Ambigua (Dec 2015)
"Sexplosion": corps armés chez Virginie Despentes
Abstract
Virginie Despentes’ Apocalyse Bébé (2010) is telling the story of a quest: Lucie -a private detective rather stuck and clumsy –is commissioned to find the lost adolescent Valentine Galtan. Eventually, the young girl is found and taken back to Paris, where only two days after her return she lets herself explode in what you could call a real kamikaze suicide. In or-der to understand this shattering finale, we have to look at Beatriz Precia-do’s (Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics, 2008) queer and postporn ideas on technosexuality which will help us to understand Despentes’ lite-rary universe characterized by anti-heroines who take up a defiant stance against society through a dissent use of their bodies. Such a reading of the novel aims at understanding the connection between the technosexual reappropriation of Valentine’s body and her vindictive anger. We shall also think about the use and function of the armed body in the novel. Thus, the starting point of our considerations will be to think about Valentine’s corpo-rality as a weapon for social vengeance as well as a personal vindicate. Valentine is transformed into a sex bomb by introducing an actual missile into her uterus which makes her explode. A radical gesture indeed, it ex-presses a real political commitment since it should allow to build the foun-dations of a renewed society. The novel fits in with the understanding of feminist and porn-terrorist aesthetics.
