Disciplining Deviant Women: the Critical Reception of Baise-moi

Abstract

Since the emergence of the New French Extremity genre, the depiction of both non-simulated sex and extreme violence in the medium of film has become a perennial issue that calls for new feminist discourses. This is even more so when a film includes subversive female sexuality and women perpetrators of violence. These topics need to be explored in relation to gender issues, as it is only when one radically subverts conventional cinematic representations of sex, violence, and women that the pervasive “mad” or “bad” dichotomy restricting our understanding of violent women in film can be weakened. The role of marginalised women directors who make subversive films must also be considered as it invites an exploration of the interventions that radical women can make, especially pertaining to the issues of sex, violence, and dominant aesthetics in film. Reviews by amateur and journalistic Anglophone and Francophone film critics are especially revealing of the dominant attitudes facing subversive, sex-positive, radical, and provocative feminist films and women directors. From this backdrop, this paper explores the socio-cultural reasons for the strongly critical reception of the contemporary French film Baise-moi (dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, 2000), from an anarcha-feminist perspective.