Abstract
This thesis is the first book-length study of the contemporary French writer and filmmaker, Virginie Despentes. In it, I read Despentes’s work with and against queer and feminist theory; I use her work as a prism for examining some of the tensions, complexities, and possibilities that arise when we think ‘queer’ and ‘feminist’ together. The thesis begins with an extensive theoretical introduction, in which I offer the concept of queer-feminist aesthetics as a framework for understanding Despentes’s project; in so doing, I bring queer theory to bear on feminist debates about aesthetic enquiry. The main body of the thesis is divided into three chronological chapters, each of which focuses on two primary texts (literary or filmic) by Despentes. I argue that these works by Despentes are characterised by a certain duality: she consistently juxtaposes violence, atomisation, and crisis, with futurity, kinship, and connection. In Despentes’s work, I thus find fertile ground for analysis of some seemingly contradictory impulses that arise across and within queer and feminist thought, including antisocial versus reparative theory, and deconstructive versus affirmative approaches to identity. In my analysis of Despentes’s oeuvre, I also uncover a preoccupation with the subversion of boundaries: she ‘troubles’ the boundaries that are usually imposed between bodies, nations, genres, intellectual traditions, and feminist ‘waves’. Yet I remain attuned to the limitations of ‘boundary crossing’ as a creative practice and conceptual tool, and highlight the risks of it being used as an uncritical signifier of ‘transgression’.The three chapters of this thesis correspond to three important, interrelated elements of Despentes’s oeuvre: her controversial early works of fiction, her mid-career, pro-sex non-fiction, and her more recent, commercially successful novels. This thesis is not, then, intended as a comprehensive survey of Despentes’s entire output. Rather, I focus on the subversive, queer (and) feminist tendencies that find expression in a number of key texts; I aim to contribute to the small but rapidly expanding body of secondary literature on Despentes, while also intervening into a broader field of knowledge about how ‘queer’ and ‘feminist’ act on each other in contemporary thought and cultural production. I proceed from Donna Haraway’s assertion that ‘it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’ (2016b, 12); I look to the worlds in Despentes’s work as means to understand, critique, and reorientate our own.
| Date of Award | 1 May 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Supervisor | Siobhan McIlvanney (Supervisor) & Ros Murray (Supervisor) |