King Kong théorie

King Kong théorie is Virginie Despentes's 2006 feminist manifesto, a short, incendiary book of essays that draws on her own life to argue for a feminism unafraid of anger, contradiction, or the margins. Writing as a woman who has been raped, worked in the sex industry, and moved through punk and pornographic subcultures, Despentes refuses the roles of victim, token, or model of respectability.

Across a handful of chapters she dismantles the scripts that teach women their bodies exist to please men and that their sexuality is a currency, while insisting that men, too, are trapped by the same rigid ideas of gender. The book's title invokes the film's giant ape as an image of a self that refuses the neat binaries of male and female, human and animal, civilized and wild.

Blunt, funny, and confrontational, King Kong théorie became a touchstone of twenty-first-century feminist writing and found a wide new readership in the wake of #MeToo. It reads at once as autobiography, cultural criticism, and call to arms.