Les Chiennes savantes

Les Chiennes savantes is an early novel by Virginie Despentes that Michèle Schaal reads through the lens of noir and hard-boiled detective fiction to reveal materialist feminist insights.

The book presents explicit depictions of sexual violence and critiques how women are commodified and defined in relation to men, showing how internalized norms can make marginalized people complicit in their own oppression.

Despentes uses genre conventions—reversing tropes such as the femme fatale—to interrogate corruption, power, and the persistence of heteropatriarchy.

Though Despentes seldom dwells on this novel in interviews, Schaal argues it plays a key role in articulating the author's diagnostic approach to social violence.