After writing, “from the realms of the ugly, for the ugly, the old, the bull dykes, the frigid, the unfucked, the unfuckable, the hysterics, the freaks, all those excluded from the great meat market of female flesh,” after working a string of disparate jobs (housekeeper, hostess in a massage parlor, freelancer for, variously, rock and porno magazines, salesperson in a Paris Virgin Megastore bookstore branch), after “Baise-moi-gate,” in which her 2000 film, co-directed with Coralie Trinh-Thi, was engulfed by the justice system and had its release interrupted by a decision from the French Conseil d’État that, due to overly explicit sexual imagery, reclassified it as pornography…after having been formally confronted by the limits of what one is allowed to say—but reassured that this confrontation spoke to a healthy artistic practice—Virginie Despentes created Mutantes, passing the microphone back to sex-positive feminists, post-porn queer activists and sex workers advocating for total sexual freedom, through a series of testimonials considered an audiovisual complement to her book King Kong Theory, which came out three years prior and opens with the above quote.

Gabrielle Ouimet
Tënk's Artistic Director