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Abstract
The article analyses two contrasting examples of representations of rape in French art films. One is Virginie Despentes and Coralie Thrin Thi's Citation2000 film Baise‐moi (Fuck me). The other is Caspar Noé's Citation2002 film Irreversible. By using these two films as examples, I wish to point out the relation between aesthetics and ideological effects by employing the deconstructive potentials of feminist and queer theory. These films are part of a European trend using explicit, documentary depictions of sexuality in the shock‐aesthetics of new‐realism. Though having very different implications with regard to gendered ideological discourses, both enactments of rape in Baise‐moi and Irreversible indicate a heteronormative cultural script as a parameter. This script is either repeated through what I call a realism of convention or displaced and challenged through a performative politics of “perverse” aesthetics: a realism of queering.
Notes
1. Baise‐moi's encounter with censorship caused different problems in different countries. See Adrian Gargett (Citation2002) and Scott MacKenzie (Citation2002).