Bye-Bye to Betty’s Blues and “La Bonne Meuf”: Temporal Drag and Queer Subversions of the Rom-Com in Bye Bye Blondie (Virginie Despentes, 2011)

Abstract

When Bye Bye Blondie (Despentes, 2011) debuted in cinemas in 2011, critics were surprised by the uncharacteristically sentimental turn that the film’s director appeared to have taken. As reviewer Jordan Mintzer summarized, this was a “more accessible sophomore effort” than the ultra-violent, rape revenge movie Baise-moi (Despentes, 2000) that made Despentes a feminist enfant terrible among fans of contemporary French pop culture.¹ As a novelist, director, and essayist, Despentes has become known as part of a third-wave anarcho-feminism in France. From her critical essay/manifesto King Kong Théorie (2006) to Baise-moi and her documentary on queer pornography Mutantes (2009), Despentes is not known to shy away from controversy, focusing on tropes of sex positivity and women’s capacity for violence as a source of empowerment. Her films have been associated with the rise of an ultra-violent genre of “new extremism” in Europe while her explicit representations of women’s sexuality have earned her a place alongside other sex positive feminists in France such as Wendy Delorme and Emilie Jouvet.² By contrast, Bye Bye Blondie unexpectedly seemed to curry favor with a generic mainstay of commercialized cinema (albeit with a lesbian twist): the romantic comedy. Diane Negra observes a common “enchantment effect” in films such as Bridget Jones’s Diary (Mcguire, 2001), 13 Going on 30 (Winick, 2004), and TV series Sex and the City (1998–2004), which connects the rom-com genre to the ideals of the postfeminist Zeitgeist: “Over and over again the postfeminist subject is represented as having lost herself but then (re)achieving stability through romance, de-aging, a makeover, by giving up paid work, or coming home”.³