Unbecoming Woman: The Shadow Feminism of King Kong théorie by Virginie Despentes

Abstract

This article establishes a dialogue between Virginie Despentes’s 2006 memoir-cum-manifesto, King Kong théorie and Jack Halberstam’s theorization of ‘shadow feminism’. For Halberstam, ‘not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures (…) Shadow feminisms take the form not of becoming, being, and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, un-becoming, and violating’. In King Kong théorie, I argue, Despentes embraces her failure to ‘become woman’, and her accounts of rape and rape fantasy present a refusal of mastery wherein the subject might unravel, come undone. Through her use of the King Kong metaphor, Despentes connects ‘unbecoming woman’ to an unravelling of the human subject; King Kong figures in the text as a composite, cyborgian creature, with whom Despentes herself identifies. In King Kong théorie, then, Despentes adopts a shadowy, hybrid positionality, forging a textual space for all creatures who fail to be or become woman.