Women in French

Dominique Carlini Versini and Michèle Schaal are delighted to announce the publication of their co-edited issue of CFC Intersections “Virginie Despentes: an Intersectional Author(?)/Virginie Despentes : une autrice intersectionnelle (?)”.

On 2 March 2020, Virginie Despentes published “Césars: désormais, on se lève et on se barre” in Libération, a “tribune” in support of actor Adèle Haenel. In June of that same year, Despentes issued her “Lettre adressée à mes amis blancs qui ne voient pas où est le problème…,” broadcast on France Inter. While these two opinion pieces triggered antagonistic responses, commentators agreed that Despentes wrote them using an intersectional lens. However, these same commentators seemed to believe that embracing an intersectional perspective constituted a new development in her work or approach to feminism. In reality, they failed to acknowledge or were unaware that Despentes had adopted an intersectional standpoint to issue her social critique before publishing these two texts. Since the early 2000s, countless academic studies have stressed (even when not explicitly using the term “intersectionality”) that her novels highlight the intersection of gender, class, race, and capitalism. The CFC Intersections Special Issue “Virginie Despentes: an Intersectional Author(?)/Virginie Despentes : une autrice intersectionnelle (?),” co-edited by Michèle A. Schaal (Iowa State University) and Dominique Carlini Versini (Durham University), is the first academic anthology approaching Despentes’s work from an intersectional perspective. Contributions by Carlini Versini, Nadia Louar (University of Wisconsin Oshkosh), Isabelle Marc (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Thomas Muzart (Pomona College), and Schaal examine and question how and whether (or not) Despentes has articulated intersectional politics in her fiction and lesser-studied productions such as podcast interviews or shorter non-fiction pieces.

Table of contents for CFC Intersections 5.1 (“Virginie Despentes: an Intersectional Author(?)/Virginie Despentes : une autrice intersectionnelle (?)”)

1. Michèle A. Schaal - “Introduction: Virginie Despentes: an intersectional author(?) / Virginie Despentes : une autrice intersectionnelle (?)” (1-9)

2. Nadia Louar - “Intersectional aesthetics: negotiating legibility and resistance in Virginie Despentes’s Les Jolies choses and Marie NDiaye’s ‘Les sœurs’” (11-30)

3. Isabelle Marc - “Une tendresse de femme adulte:” une nouvelle politique des liens dans Vernon Subutex de Virginie Despentes”(31-50)

4. Dominique Carlini Versini - “Intersections de crises dans Cher connard” (51-66)

5. Michèle A. Schaal - “Quand Despentes pense l’intersectionnalité” (67-85)

6. Thomas Muzart - “From calling out to calling in: Virginie Despentes’s feminist ethics in podcasting” (87-103)