New Books Network Michèle Schaal, "Grrrl Writing: Virginie Despentes's Authorial Politics" (Peter Lang, 2026)
Feb 24, 2026
Michèle Schaal, Professor of French and women’s and gender studies who wrote a monograph on Virginie Despentes. She maps Despentes’s punk‑infused “Grrrl writing.” Short takes cover Baise‑moi as picaresque critique, noir and materialist feminist readings, gender‑bent and punk lineages, twin plots and stunted female socialization, and how literary genres expose heteropatriarchal power.
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Heteropatriarchy Is Tentacular Not Just Binary
- Schaal defines heteropatriarchy broadly as a tentacular system linking gender, sexuality, economy, kinship, race, and class.
- She stresses this broader definition matters because Despentes's early fiction mainly centers gender and class but gestures to other axes of oppression.
Punk As Political Way Of Life Shaped Despentes
- Schaal insists punk should be read beyond music as an ongoing political and cultural way of life that shaped Despentes.
- She critiques simplistic uses of 'punk' in scholarship and situates Despentes within a lived alternative praxis.
Baise-moi Recast As Modern Picaresque Critique
- Schaal reads Baise-moi through the picaresque to show its focus on society's downtrodden and as a critique of exclusion.
- She argues the picaresque frame explains the protagonists' violent rebellion as a problematic route to agency.
