From screen to stage: Mutantes’s sex-positive influence on King Kong Théorie

In order to rectify important gaps in scholarship, this article examines how Virginie Despentes’s documentary Mutantes: Féminisme Porno Punk (2009), her autobiographical essay King Kong Théorie (2006), and its theatrical adaptation play off one another to advance the argument that Despentes’s transnational feminism has its roots in the sex-positive movement that began in the United States in the early 1980s.1 At the heart of her work, this feminism influences King Kong Théorie and much of her fiction.2 Despentes, inspired by the sex-positive movement that began in the United States in the early 1980s, interviewed its American pioneers in 2005 for her documentary, Mutantes. These interviews articulate a sex-positive feminism that strives to destigmatize sex work by promoting it as a legitimate, lucrative, and often enjoyable way to earn a living. It resoundingly refutes the notion of the sex worker as victim. Mutantes also focuses on the performances by European postporn collectives trying to find non-binary ways to express sexuality and desire. This “pro-sexe” stance would shape both Despentes’s feminist manifesto King Kong Théorie one year later and her fiction, for she evokes it in brief references to sex workers in her Vernon Subutex trilogy. In a nod to the campy personalities and performers in Mutantes, Vanessa Larré’s production of King Kong Théorie (2018), that she adapted to the theater with Valérie de Dietrich, also aims to educate and challenge. With provocative and jocular scenes and shots, Mutantes and Larré’s play knock viewers and theatergoers off kilter to make them reflect on the ways gender-based and heteronormative binaries stifle both men and women in patriarchal societies. While some of the performances, images, and non-binary sex toys in Mutantes may be upsetting to viewers, that is exactly the point: to defy gender and sexual norms to open up new possibilities for individuals shut out by the binary. Both the documentary and the play tackle taboo subjects with ludic humor in a way that stimulates reflection on the part of the audience in a disarming, unthreatening manner. This paper uncovers the way the camp sensibilities in Mutantes rub off on the play’s adaptation since both capture the humor, joviality, playfulness, and oftentimes self-deprecation of the sex-positive American feminists that worked their way into Despentes’s writing. Mutantes and the play also concretely underscore the ways Despentes’s works are shaping contemporary feminist writers such as Chloé Delaume and Gabrielle Deydier and artists and actors such as Larré and Dietrich.