Microsoft Word - 011.CINEJ9.2.321 (1).docx


 

    
 
 
 
 

 
 

 
 
 
 
Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation:  
Baise Moi and Hard-Core Pornography 
Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz, National University of Ireland Galway, temmuzsr@gmail.com 
 

Abstract 
Based on a theoretical framework developed by the works of critical theorists Michel Foucault and Judith 
Butler, this article questions the role of gendered representation in the discourse around the film Baise Moi 
(Despentes and Trinh Thi, 2000). The film has been criticized, due to its engagement with pornography and 
trash aesthetics as well as its “bad ending”, and associated with a reaffirmation of patriarchal power practices 
on screen. This article argues that such readings remain within the limited territory of seeking an ideal 
representation of femininity based on the gender/sex binary which Butler’s early work on gender has 
critiqued. The first section of the article explores the discourse of “extremity” and “illegality” that surrounds 
Baise Moi by way of situating the concept of “screen representation” within the Foucauldian territory of 
power. Following this trajectory, the article discusses how Baise Moi conveys a layered audio-visual 
organization and negativity that attest to the attainability of non-conforming sexualities through an ironic 
adoption of pornography. It is argued that the film’s ironic and referential negative aesthetics exploits and 
overwrites the narrative – the narrative that provides the means through which the film can overturn gender 
norms associated with the genres it adopts from, such as hard-core porn’s idealism around female sexuality.                                                                                                                                     
Keywords: Gender; Genre; Pornography; Sexuality; Representation; French New Extremity; Michel 
Foucault; Judith Butler 

 

 
New articles in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States License. 

 
This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part  

of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Volume 9.2 (2021) |  ISSN 2158-8724 (online)  |  DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321  |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 



            CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation  
Volume 9.2 (2021)  |  ISSN 2158-8724 (online)  |  DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321  |  http://cinej.pitt.edu 

       100 

Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation:  
Baise Moi and Hard-Core Pornography 

Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz               s 

Introduction 

This article aims to bring the theoretical line between the Foucauldian understanding of sexuality and 

Judith Butler’s questioning of the construction of gendered subjectivity, to the issue of representing 

sexuality on screen, specifically visual depictions of the acts of sex. Although the works of these 

theorists have been well established within various fields of critical analysis for decades now, many 

of the ideas they have brought under scrutiny, such as gender binary and the so-called naturality of 

sexuality, continue to hold resonance today. When sexuality is taken as a modern concept evolved 

through the structures of power and bio-politics, its representation on screen becomes a subject of 

how these structures infiltrate the production of screen media and have an effect on what it is that can 

be visible and representable. Drawing from this line of thought, this article explores the questions of 

representation in relation to the problematization of the understanding of sexuality as natural and 

gender as a universality. In doing so, it puts forward the French film Baise Moi (2000) directed by 

Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi and its connection to hard-core pornography as an 

exemplary aesthetic engagement that conveys a critique of the representational structures of visibility 

on screen. While the first section of the article locates the mainstream discourse around and the 

reception of Baise Moi within the larger Foucauldian theories regarding the relationship between 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 101 

sexuality and power, the second section moves towards the discussions regarding the non-simulated 

sex scenes in the film. 

As a highly discussed film which has been a subject of a large number of case studies along the lines 

of genre, gender, transgression in cinema and feminist film theory, Baise Moi with its portrayal of 

outcast female figures embarking on a journey of sex and murder, has contributed greatly to the 

critical arena where cinematic possibilities of subversion are discussed in the last 20 years since its 

distribution in 2000 followed by a censorship controversy. The film's narrative echoes a road movie 

narrative: two women hitting the road, committing illegal activities, such as murder and robbery, 

having a variety of sexual encounters until their journey ends with one of them killed in a hold-up 

and the other is caught by the authorities. One of the main analyses concerning Baise Moi written by 

Lisa Downing investigates the film in the context of ‘postmodern porn’ that is ‘placed in dialogue 

with recent deconstructive gender theory’ (Downing 2010, 265). Judith Franco also examines the 

film's position in the genre world, sees a juxtaposition of road-movie and rape-revenge narrative in 

Baise Moi, and questions whether the film presents a subversive portrayal of “feminine sexuality” 

(Franco 2004). It has been commonly said that the film carries an extremity (Romney 2004) that 

seems to lead critics and scholars to place the film within the category of French New Extremity and 

to compare it with other films associated with this category; such as Catherine Briellat's A Ma Soeur! 

(2001) (Nettleback 2003, 65) or Romance (1999) (Quandt 2011, 20) and Gaspar Noé's Irreversible 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

102 

(2002) (Downing 2004, 268). Regarding the capacious coverage of the term ‘extremity’, these 

interpretations differ from each other according to the theoretical frameworks they adopt. However, 

they share a common argument: Baise Moi is ‘extreme’. In the winter 2020 issue of CineJ Cinema 

Journal, Şirin Fulya Erensoy also argues that the film follows the tradition of French New Extremity 

which is characterized by the subversion of genre tropes, bodily violence and ‘a pessimistic 

worldview’ articulated through ‘conservative endings that reaffirm the status quo’ (Erensoy 2020, 

65-66). While Erensoy interprets the bad ending of the film as a final – and conservative – 

conclusion to whether subversion of gender roles can be possible in the world of Baise Moi, some of 

the earlier criticisms of the film regarded the sexually graphic scenes as a reiteration of the 

patriarchal gaze that dominates porn industry. This article counterargues that the visual organization 

of sex in the film as well as its parodic tone and cinematographic reflexivity overwrite the direct 

meaning of the “bad ending” found on the narrative level, rather than vice-versa, especially in terms 

of subverting the politics of visibility. I argue that it is precisely these narrative conventions of genres 

– i.e. hard-core porn and road movies – that enabled the film’s irony as these conventions were 

utilized and disrupted simultaneously by the film’s low-budget trash aesthetics.   

One of the directors of the film Virginie Despentes, who also wrote the book with the same title on 

which the film was based, did not necessarily categorize her film as an ‘extreme film’ when critics 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 103 

called it one of the ‘the New French Extremity's most graphic and confrontational texts’ (Romney 

2004). For instance, Despentes gave a very simple answer to a question about whether they made the 

film as a feminist warning in an interview in 2009: ‘We wanted to make a punk movie. […] We 

loved the movies from the 80’s [sic] Scorsese, Ferrara, De Palma’s Scarface [De Palma 1983], Tobe 

Hooper, Wes Craven and so with a tiny, tiny budget, we wanted to shoot the same kind of story: 

strong friendship, outcasts, graphic violence, sex and a bad ending’ (Kelly). While Despentes 

continued giving such ironic responses to the reception of Baise Moi’s relationship to ‘extremity’, 

film scholar Neil Archer opened up a different discussion surrounding the issue of provocation: ‘If its 

extremes of real sex and fictional violence provoke, its real concern is where we are supposed to 

draw a line; not merely in representational terms, but in terms of personal pleasure, consumption and 

social space’  (Archer 2009, 75). This argument takes the individuality of the state of being provoked 

into account and shows that the provocation that might be at stake here relies on the spectator's 

personal relationship with the film's content and his/her social space as much as on the film's own 

ability to reach to its spectator's position. Considering the film’s promotional strategy as well as the 

media coverage and categorisations, it is still hard to brush off the ‘extremity talk’ that revolves 

around the film. Starting from the film’s tongue-in-cheek promotional language and how its 

pornographic connotations were perceived in the mainstream media, next section explores the 

language of the law that surrounded Baise Moi’s initial reception. 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

104 

Language of the Law 

On the DVD cover of the film Baise Moi (2000), there is the tagline ‘the most extreme thriller you'll 

ever see legally’. This tagline can be subject to a discussion around what type of a promotional 

strategy was followed and might require a look at the film market within which that strategy was 

assumed to be working. On the other hand, it brings the problem of legality to spectatorship, 

resonating the very old regulatory function of the law as a censorship mechanism. Similar to the case 

with this tagline, the famous popular culture magazine Rolling Stone published a film list, which 

included Baise Moi, called ‘Barely Legal: 30 Nearly Pornographic Mainstream Films’ in 2014 and 

claimed that those 30 films are as close to porn as a mainstream film can be. Even though this piece 

does not delve into genre and what kind of a relationship porn genre has with mainstream cinema, it 

underlines an important aspect of screening sex: it is related to legality. The term ‘legal’ seems to be 

used as an attention-getter both on the DVD cover and in the title of the Rolling Stone piece. 

However, rather than focusing on its marketing aspect which could lead to a discussion around the 

ethics of promotional strategies in film industry, I would like to turn to the symbolic meanings of the 

‘legal’ for these can be found in the background of those strategies. The term itself conveys a sense 

of boundary, thus Baise Moi as a text, is presented by that sense: the term ‘legal’ seems to be the 

starting point for an exploration of socio-sexual boundaries that Baise Moi deconstructs, resulting in 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 105 

the creation of parodic cinematic expressions which transgress the representational politics of 

legality. 

What does it mean to see a film legally? The usage of the term ‘legal’ in the sentence seems to imply 

that an illegal form of seeing a film is in close contiguity to seeing Baise Moi. Supported by the 

mention of extremity in the film, this illegality is assumed to be reminiscent of pornography. The 

connotation that the tagline allures to is that Baise Moi includes almost-illegal-to-watch pornographic 

scenes. Here, ‘pornographic’ does not have to be illegal altogether in order for it to carry the idea of 

illegality. The mainstream heterosexual pornography in this formula is constructed as illegal, 

independent from the factuality of such illegality. The fact that legal restrictions of what people can 

and cannot consume have been performed through censorship and prohibition has made it 

exceedingly easy to surround pornography with illegality everywhere.  

Recognizing law as a discourse calls attention to how law establishes regulations, 
thoughts, and behavior and institutes expectations of what is legitimate and illegitimate 
behavior, what is acceptable and unacceptable, what is criminal and legal, what is 
rational and irrational, what is natural and unnatural. Therefore, the study of law as a 
discourse is not limited to specific laws or to the activity of litigation or litigators; rather 
it is the study of these laws as they operate as symbols for what is legal, honorable, 
natural, objective and so on. In the sense the symbolization of law is more than its 
specific language. (Eisenstein 1988, 43) 

The literal meaning of the adjective ‘legal’ is ‘relating to the law’ or ‘permitted by the law’. As Zillah 

R. Eisenstein clarifies above, accepting ‘law’ only as a definition of a governmental practice would 

be a limited approach if we try to understand what this language actually regulates and shapes in the 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

106 

societal perception of ‘lawfulness’. Acceptable, rational, honourable and natural come across as the 

terms belonging to a language that is constructed by the law which ‘embodies the relations of 

patriarchy through the differentiation, by sex, of gender’ (Eisenstein 1988, 51). Eisenstein's account 

of the symbolization of the law extends the meanings and powers of what is perceived as ‘legal’, and 

thus, ‘legal’ can be used to define actions that conform to the heteronormative laws of patriarchy – 

i.e. by ‘legal’, we understand, imposed social norms. 

According to the tagline, it is legal to watch Baise Moi: it is acceptable, it is not a violation of the 

law. However, the tagline also suggests that there are elements in the film that provide an experience 

that is similar to an illegal and unacceptable viewing. When conforming to the legal does not require 

a total exclusion of the extreme, it is implied that there exists a tendency towards illegality in the 

audience, by way of underlining that crossing the border of the legal is about to happen. The tagline 

promotes the tendency to be illegal by saying that watching the film is still within the borders of the 

legal. This approach to ‘the legal’, that which produces illegality by way of the law's construction of 

borders, implies that subversion of the legal is only possible within the borders of the law. Spectators 

do not have to commit to the illegal and unacceptable but they will still have the illegal and 

unacceptable experience by seeing Baise Moi. The goal behind this premise of the tagline seems to 

be about promoting the film by almost saying that Baise Moi is very close to being a porn movie. The 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 107 

question of whether the film is along the lines of porn movies is directly connected to the discursive 

sphere around the film, from the tagline to the film’s role in the changes in censorship regulations 

both in France and the UK, the film’s ironic appropriation of hard-core pornography signifies a 

negativity that projects what is lacking within the representational formats of its associated genres. 

Leila Wimmer and Scott McKenzie investigate the scandalous reception of the film and the rating 

and censorship issues surrounding its inclusion of pornographic images (McKenzie 2002; Wimmer 

2011). McKenzie’s focus on the British Board of Film Classification’s report on Baise Moi and their 

request for significant cuts unearths the obfuscated moral agendas around what is considered de-facto 

pornographic by the rating systems (McKenzie 2002: 321-323). As such, how can we situate the 

negativity ingrained in the ironic employment of hard-core pornography in Baise Moi in terms of 

how it constructs its own subjects in relation to gender? How do the borders of legality provide the 

means through which the film questions and parodies the gendered representational formats of porn 

and road-movie? To attempt to answer these questions, I would like to turn to Judith Butler’s 

deconstruction of gender/sex binary as it seems to provide a theoretical trajectory for the seemingly 

paradoxical aesthetics of Baise Moi; aesthetics that points to some sort of an  

illegal feminism that is sceptical of the representability of gender. 

 

 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

108 

Representation within the Borders of the Legal 

Judith Butler in Gender Trouble takes Foucault's claim ‘power and sexuality are coextensive’ (Butler 

1990, 38) further by suggesting that the normative framework of the law positions ‘the natural 

sexuality’ as independent from the law itself as if ‘the natural’ is not produced by its power relations. 

By this way it asserts that subversion of the sexual norms ‘requires a sexuality that somehow escapes 

the hegemonic prohibitions on sex’ (Butler 1990, 39). That is to say, according to the law, there 

cannot exist a subversive sexuality within the terms of its hegemony or it cannot be possible to 

displace the sexual norms by using the law's own normative discourses. Hence, a subversive 

displaced sexuality means an escape from power relations or rather a disappearance; meaning that 

there is no room or a form of existence for subversive sexualities inside of its hegemony. However, 

for Foucault, this cannot be the case, since sexuality and power coexist, co-appear. In fact, power 

provokes its subjects to push the boundaries of the law by way of enforcing ‘the natural’. Butler 

expands on the functions of power and underlines its productive aspect: ‘Power, rather than the law, 

encompasses both the juridical (prohibitive and regulatory) and the productive (inadvertently 

generative) functions of differential relations’ (Butler 1990, 39). Here, prohibitive and regulatory 

aspects of power make ‘the productions swerve from their original purposes and inadvertently 

mobilize possibilities of 'subjects' that do not merely exceed the bounds of cultural intelligibility, but 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 109 

effectively expand the boundaries of what is, in fact, culturally intelligible’ (Butler 1990, 39). If we 

look at the borders of the social environment of the protagonists in Baise Moi, we see that the agents 

of power in the beginning of the narrative, i.e. Manu’s brother or Nadine’s roommate, provide the 

initial triggers for them to hit the road and thus enable their repressions to become visible and lead 

them to transform the social prohibition they had been tolerating. The ‘low’ lives of the protagonists 

do not stay within the borders of their ‘low’ territory, they swerve as long as their togetherness on the 

road continue and ascend throughout a road-movie excessiveness. The mobilization of their 

‘lowness’ to a parodic criminality on the narrative level is intensified by the mobilization of the 

narration itself to an ironic representation of a self-aware genre hybridity. This self-aware genre-

appropriation of the film ultimately deals with the representation of sex in road movie or hard-core 

porn as a culturally constructed concept, hence how sex itself becomes legal, visible and intelligible 

is being interrogated in this genre-centered paradigm. 

Butler questions the understanding of gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, problematizing how 

certain strands of feminism seek a ‘true’ representation of women as if there is a universality attached 

to the category of women. In fact, the category of women itself is problematic for Butler, since it 

actually might not be possible for ‘woman’ to refer to a universal identity. Separating gender from its 

political and cultural intersections results in the development of the misconception that ‘the 

oppression of women has some singular form discernible in the universal or hegemonic structure of 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

110 

patriarchy or masculine domination’ (Butler 1990, 39). The idea of this universality that is attached 

to the whole discussion actually signals the main problem: the fact that the term ‘social construct’ has 

to convey a meaning of diversity not a universality, due to the differing ways in which it occurs in 

each social region and accordingly with variety of social conditions, has been neglected in favor of 

optimizing political strategies. Briefly, Butler suggests that the search for a specifically correct 

representation of the category of women constrains its own political struggle, and the category's 

exclusionary form impairs its own idea of universality. This leads her to the discussion of the 

difference between sex and gender, since the ways in which these categories are developed are 

closely connected to the issue of how representation can be possible. Is it sex or gender that 

distinguishes the persons who can be involved in the category?  

According to Gender Trouble, sex cannot be distinct from gender, since body is not an exclusive 

biological attribute but yet another field on which the law seems to apply its regulative and 

productive functions. It is commonly accepted now that gender is a social construction, thus its status 

as a political appliance for production of sexual norms has been subject to feminist criticisms. On the 

other hand, a necessary emphasis on sex being gender, or rather being a tool for concealing the 

constructed nature of ‘the natural’, as Butler clarifies, seems to be overlooked. This is the reason why 

‘binary sex’ might still be seen as a biological result that we do not have control over, whereas 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 111 

gender binary can be seen as an inevitable consequence of the law which should be challenged, for 

feminism. Since the distinction between sex and gender seems to be at work in favor of the demands 

of heterosexual norms, the difference between ‘binary sex’ and ‘gender binary’ can be initially seen 

as a derivative of that distinction.  

The assumed differences between female sexuality and male sexuality are all taken here as the results 

of the productive aspect of the law, meaning that there is nothing natural about them. They are 

actually intrinsic to the heteronormative oppression of sexuality and thus, ‘female sexuality’ cannot 

be used without referring to where it is constructed and embedded in, the heteronormative culture. 

Therefore, seeking a ‘true’ representation of female sexuality in any area of that culture is doomed to 

reproduce the ideals of the law and thus it can result in ascribing a certain ‘trueness’ to sexuality all 

together to justify this search. How can we utilize the fluctuating relationship between power and 

sexuality without reiterating that the ‘true’ representation of femaleness, or maleness for that matter, 

can only be found outside of power relations, as if we can find ‘a fe/male’ outside of it? 

It is important at this point to clarify the way the term ‘representation of female sexuality’ is 

understood. The question is how the subject of a particular representation can be known, in other 

words, the problem that occurs when a certain representation is assumed to have a fixed subject. 

Concerning Stuart Hall’s definition of representation as ‘the process by which members of a culture 

use language […] to produce meaning’ (Hall 1997, 61) which accordingly ‘carries the important 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

112 

premise that things [...] do not have in themselves any fixed, final or true meaning’ (Hall 1997, 61), 

the relationship between the subject and the representation can be taken as an unsteady and ready-to-

be-misplaced cultural connection. As such, assuming that a natural ‘female sexuality’ has not found 

its true representation in culture runs the risk of proving itself to be erroneous. Judith Butler points 

out in the introduction of Gender Trouble that feminist analyzing has to be aware of the fact that ‘the 

domains of political and linguistic “representation” set out in advance the criterion by which subjects 

themselves are formed, with the result that representation is extended only to what can be 

acknowledged as a subject’ (Butler 1990, 4). Power relations construct ‘female sexuality’ as a subject 

of representation by way of producing the idea that it has a fixed meaning. If the subjects are 

produced by power in a way that they would be installed within the matrix of the law's 

representational politics, that means power also produces the subjects that seem to be defying the 

norms of the law because they are also representable as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘illegal’ in terms of the 

regulatory language. This is why, for instance, when ‘female sexuality’ seems to be represented in 

any cultural medium as a threat to society, reacting to that representation as if it is a 

‘misrepresentation of female sexuality’ seems self-defeating. Can there exist an immutable subject 

that has not yet been represented or has been misrepresented; in the case of ‘female sexuality’? 

Butler also asks: 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 113 

What sense does it make to extend representation to subjects who are constructed 
through the exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative 
requirements of the subject? What relations of domination and exclusion are 
inadvertently sustained when representation becomes the sole focus of politics? (Butler 
1990, 9) 

We can add another question here, what happens to the sexualities that are excluded by the subjection 

methods of the law? Could certain cinematic expressions – as in the case of Baise Moi – create an 

alternative through subversion of the law’s own cultural methods like the fiction of hard-core 

pornography? Foucault suggests that ‘taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power’ 

and ‘analyzing power relations through antagonism of strategies’ (Foucault 1982, 780) would help to 

examine and disclose how power actually works. Resistance against the law's methods of 

constructing subjection would be possible through analyzing how power produces the antagonist 

subjects within its culture. Instead of striving to pull the defiant subjects that are represented as 

abnormal back into the borders of the acceptable subjects of the normative framework, investigating 

what those subjects offer through their position of antagonism might provide the means through 

which we can reach the sexualities that are excluded by that subjection. As Foucault says ‘to find out 

what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of 

insanity. And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality’ (Foucault 1982, 780). 

Annette Kuhn, in her text ‘The Body and Cinema’ talks about why visual representation is a special 

problem for feminism, looking at the problem of gendered subjectivities in cinema. She puts ‘the 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

114 

notion of the instrumentality of representation’ (Kuhn 1997, 209) under scrutiny: ‘Representation 

participates in the various relations of power with which we are surrounded and in which we are 

always in one way or another implicated. Representation can be understood, then, as a form of 

regulation’ (Kuhn 1997, 204). She proposes different strategies for resistance against the regulatory 

function of representation, stating that ‘the search for new forms of expression is more productively 

seen in terms of resistance to the powers of representation than as taking place outside their “field of 

force”’ (Kuhn 1997, 205). Kuhn's assertion seems to be in close relation to Butler's idea that there is 

a possibility for ‘subjects’ to be mobilized and expand the borders of what is ‘culturally intelligible’. 

This is where we finally look back at how the critical approach towards ‘the legal’ that is drawn from 

Baise Moi's tagline could be an example of this kind of veiled resistance, challenging the borders 

between legal and illegal without needing to locate itself outside the legal's ‘field of force’. In fact, 

the tagline seems to use a method quite contrary to a hypothetical necessity of an ascription of a 

utopic status beyond the legal, it states that the illegality can be experienced specifically within the 

borders of the legal.  

Drawing from this trajectory, we can situate Baise Moi through a number of theories around 

subverting the borders of subjectivity and argue that antagonism and dissonant visibilities can 

mobilize the methods of subjection found in ‘binary sex’. I discuss below how Baise Moi produces a 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 115 

cinematic resistance and visible antagonism against ‘binary sex’ developed by formulating its own 

pornographic language via pushing the borders between art-house and pornography. Next section 

focuses on the scenes where Baise Moi borrows from hard-core pornography for irony, exploring the 

functions of non-simulated sex scenes in the film. I propose that adopting certain aspects of hard-core 

pornography provides the means through which the film can point out the problems with the core 

idealism of ‘binary sex’ and its subjection methods that structure the very same genre. The film does 

not look to ascribe the gendered subjection, which hard-core porn inherently holds for women, to its 

characters, since it focuses on individuality and attainability of different sexualities that are not 

conforming to the representational structures. At the same time, it shows the possibility of 

constructing swerving subjectivities and connections that push against these power structures which 

produced hard-core porn's assumptions about a universal sexuality based on ‘binary sex’.  

 

The Effect of Non-Simulated Sex and ‘The Visible’ 

The fact that the main actors perform actual intercourse in the film and the scenes in which these 

performances take place adopt porn aesthetics, seems to have given way to look at those scenes as 

sexually provocative and pornographic by taking them outside of their contexts. Lisa Downing takes 

a comprehensive approach towards Baise Moi with the intention to explore ‘what happens to 

heterosexual pornographic conventions when they are juxtaposed with other filmic codes, here codes 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

116 

of violence’ (Downing 2010, 80). According to her, Baise Moi strives to show a fictional world that 

represents a society whose construction of sex and gender generates commodification of women; and 

the male dominance in this society is tried to be projected on the protagonists' performance of sex 

and violence. In this respect, Manu and Nadine can only be the productions of this society (Downing 

2010, 81). Through this reading, Downing states that Baise Moi works hard ‘to undermine discourses 

that map domination/submission onto male/female bodies by appealing to 'natural' sexed and 

gendered characteristics’ (Downing 2010, 81). Some of the ‘non-pornographic’ scenes in Baise Moi 

convince Downing that the film actually achieves to reflect upon the constructed status of gender and 

sex, thus frustrate the understanding of ‘natural sex’ that seems to be embraced by hard-core porn 

(ironically it is the same understanding that appears as a precursor of anti-porn feminism). Moreover, 

Downing does not disagree that there is a chance to view sex scenes in a more constructive light than 

merely as hard-core pornography. However, the way Baise Moi engages with hard-core pornography 

and post new-Hollywood thrillers, such as Fatal Attraction (Lyne 1987), prevents the film from 

fulfilling that chance according to Downing. She states that Baise Moi reproduces the reductive 

assumptions based on gender that are deployed by ‘a whole range of male-directed films, in which 

troublesome women are eventually punished by death or incarceration […] or forced to take their 

own lives as the only available exit from patriarchal law (as in the disingenuous ending of Thelma 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 117 

and Louise [Scott 1991] […])’ (Downing 2010, 82). The non-simulated sex scenes and the narrative 

arc in Baise Moi seem to be the main elements that lead Downing to come to that conclusion. At the 

end, she seems to be separating the sex scenes in the film from other scenes in favour of investigating 

the film's adoption of pornography. I would like to explore this separation and Downing's criticism of 

‘real’ sex in Baise Moi and suggest that the film actually disrupts the phallocentricism of hard-core 

porn. 

Downing compares the images of ‘real’ sex and the images of ‘pretend’ violence in Baise Moi and 

asserts that this dichotomy assigns a ‘truth value’ to sexuality whereby emphasizing ‘the surface 

performativity’ of violence:  

how can we take seriously the critique of normative codes of sex and gender, and the 
suggestion of alternative ways of apprehending the sexually explicit spectacle, in a 
film that simultaneously appears to take the “reality” of sex itself so seriously while 
very evidently playing at violence? (Downing 2010, 83) 

She points out a conundrum that Baise Moi might be carrying and states that there is a deliberate 

effort to create an exposure of ‘real’ sex in the film which risks upholding the constructed natural 

sexuality (Downing 2010, 83). Linda Williams' analysis of hard-core pornography as a body genre is 

particularly useful in this trajectory for Downing: ‘Sex, in the sense of a natural, biological and 

visible “doing what comes naturally,” is the supreme fiction of hard-core pornography; and gender, 

the social construction of the relations between “the sexes,” is what helps constitute that fiction’ 

(Williams 1989, 267). Downing applies this analysis to Baise Moi, asserting that the sex scenes in the 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

118 

film are no different than those in commercial hard-core porn scenes. However, sex in Baise Moi is 

not a singular method of action that happens the same every time, it is shown in relation to, and in a 

nested way towards, Manu and Nadine's non-linear mode of living based on performance while they 

constantly move and look for performative actions that construct a self-reflexive narration. By 

underlining the very performativity of the fiction of hard-core porn and how it relies on performance 

to construct female sexuality, Baise Moi deconstructs female sexuality through constantly pointing at 

its own performativity in the tone of a mock-documentary. 

Furthermore, Williams draws attention to the historical development of the hard-core porn genre and 

how the invention of photography and cinema provided the means through which the phallocentric 

struggle for reaching to the ‘truths’ of sexual pleasure has formed its own utopia (Williams 1989, 

48). Williams states: ‘The irony […] is that, while it is possible, in a certain limited and reductive 

way to “represent” the physical male pleasure by showing erection and ejaculation, this maximum 

visibility proves elusive in the parallel confession of female sexual pleasure’ (Williams 1989, 49). 

This irony points at the invisibility of orgasm that supposedly belongs to the female body, and hard-

core pornography has been analyzed as the result of an unending desire ‘to overcome this problem of 

invisibility within a regime that is, as Beverly Brown (Brown 1981, 10) has noted, an “erotic 

organization of visibility”’ (Williams 1989, 49). This organization works for ascribing an out-of-



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 119 

control naturality to human bodies, however this ascription does not work for the ‘female orgasm’ as 

it does for that of the ‘male’. Therefore, the representable status of the ‘male orgasm’ has been 

imposed on the ‘female body’, as if ‘orgasm’ refers to a universal paroxysm that naturally carries a 

distinction between its beginning and ending. The conclusion is that hard-core porn's fiction about 

‘natural sexuality’ comes from its insistence to universalize pleasure in terms of phallocentric 

representations. These representations are often shown in an episodic narrative arc that is structured 

as follows; foreplay, oral sex, intercourse and the climax (ejaculation). This narrative can be the key 

for criticizing hard-core porn's ‘attempt to capture visually the frenzy of the visible in a female body 

whose orgasmic excitement can never be objectively measured’ (Williams 1989, 50). The ‘female 

body’, therefore, comes out as the source of excessive pleasures that phallocentric power cannot 

define and insert into its own narrative of pleasure as much as it wishes to. This phallocentric point of 

view can only try to understand the ‘female body’ in terms of its own masculine pleasure; and again, 

the definition of its own pleasure is also blended in the creation of sexual norms. The sex scenes in 

Baise Moi do not deploy this type of narrative, not even as an internal episode, and they are only 

parts of the film's own narrative structure (i.e. we do not see a ‘complete’ orgasm and the sex scenes 

have other functions in the overall narrative). When they are taken out of this structure, they would 

not provide enough material to establish the narrative structure around orgasm that hard-core porn 

mostly requires to affirm its ‘reality’, thus the film as a whole does not embrace hard-core's depiction 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

120 

of a universalized sexual pleasure. It renders sexual explicitness of hard-core pornography secondary 

to the self-aware relationship between two protagonists. 

After putting the history of pornography under scrutiny and explaining that cinema (and accordingly, 

pornography) create the images that have partaken in the construction of ‘what is visible’, Williams 

concludes:  

we have seen how the intensification and 'frenzy' of the visible begins, in the late 
nineteenth-century invention of 'machines of the visible,' to create even more peculiar 
forms of blindness. At the same time, we have found that this very blindness, this 
inability to make the invisible pleasure of woman manifestly visible and quantifiable, is 
the hard-core text's most vulnerable point of contradiction and the place where feminists 
who would resist a monolithic, masculine, hard-core discourse of sexuality can seek the 
power of resistance (Williams 1989, 57). 
 

The blindness here mainly points at the invisibility of ‘female sexuality’, resonating Luce Irigaray's 

idea that the vagina ‘represents the horror of nothing to see’ (Irigaray 1997, 250). Williams adopts a 

Foucauldian approach to pornography by emphasizing the importance of examining the power 

relations that give way to the construction of pornography that is based on binary sex and its 

depictions of gender. As is stated above, she also counts for the possibility of pornography providing 

resources for resistance due to its direct engagement with how sexuality can be constructed. This 

approach is similar to Annette Kuhn's idea that the regulatory representations' field of force can be 

the tool for resistance. Downing's criticism of Baise Moi stems from Williams' breakdown of 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 121 

pornography as the fiction of ‘the natural, universal sex’. However, this criticism does not go as far 

as to suggest that there can exist a pornographic practice that can dislocate ‘the visible’ by way of 

interpolating the rules of visibility, thus it can underscore the constructed notion of that which has 

been visible as part of its resistance. Baise Moi precisely makes this underscoring: the heterosexual 

intercourse, the activity that is directly or indirectly at the center of hard-core mainstream porn, is 

shown explicitly, it is what we know as visible; however it is tied with the characters' parodying of 

this visibility as a source of pleasure and how their pleasure is not disentangled from the culture that 

can still manage to be utterly shocked while experiencing ‘the visible’ outside of field of porn. At the 

same time, Baise Moi does not intend to impose an additional meaning onto the ways that Manu and 

Nadine have sex, only showing that they want it in an ironic tone (they mock the men they sexually 

encounter as well as their own lack of smart lines). By way of showing how they have sex as 

performance, the film presents that in Manu and Nadine’s world, ‘just wanting it’ can produce 

something worth seeing as well, despite the fact that the outcome might be speaking the 

pornographic language, almost like a mock-porn. This is the reason why it focuses on the actual 

intercourse, masturbation or fellatio: Manu and Nadine’s self-aware sexual activeness makes use of 

the explicitness that is claimed to be imaginable only in the territory of the visible, as a way to 

convey its parody and express the protagonists’ mockery as coping mechanisms as well as how they 

connect with one another through such parodic transgression. 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

122 

On the other hand, the ‘truth’ of sexual pleasure in hard-core porn is often sought through the 

genitals and close-ups of the genitals is the common method to discover ‘what is invisible’ in bodily 

pleasure. The fact that Baise Moi uses the same method in sex scenes might make it easier to support 

the initial claim of Downing, that the film reproduces the ‘erotic organization of visibility’ (Brown 

1981, 10), in other words, the reductive representational strategies that naturalize sexual pleasure. We 

can find an alternative suggestion to interpret this porn aesthetic in Downing’s earlier article in which 

she investigates the ‘real’ sex in sexually explicit art films including Baise Moi, Romance (Breillat 

1999) and Irréversible (Noé 2002). This time, she presents a different approach than her later 

criticism of Baise Moi: ‘Despite incorporating elements of pornography – close-ups of penetration 

and of oral sex, accompanied by pulsating music – the film does not admit of the heterosexual 

pornographic given that such sex is natural or inevitable’ (Downing 2004, 274). I would like to look 

at one of those ‘extreme’ scenes in light of Dawning’s argument in the final section below. 

In a cross-cutting scene, we see both Manu and Nadine having sexual experiences with random 

strangers in different places. First, we see Nadine entering the room of the receptionist in a hotel 

where they stay and she asks for a drink, then we see Nadine and the man sitting on a table looking at 

each other in close-ups. Nadine suddenly stands up and starts kissing the man. Then there is a cut to a 

shot in which Manu stares at a man in a bar, and before he leaves the bar, she grabs his arm and asks 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 123 

where he is going. After these quick introductions full-of close-ups to what is going to happen, we 

see them both having sexual interactions with the men in a cross-cutting scene. The classical function 

of a cross-cutting in narration is to connect the two sequences in terms of either similitude or 

contrast, depending on the content of the shots. In this scene, we can obviously talk about a 

similitude between two shots on one hand considering the exposure of body, genitals and facial 

expression of pleasure, but on the other hand there is a significant difference: Manu is having a 

sexual intercourse, whereas Nadine is performing masturbation and fellatio. In Manu's shots, we 

mostly see her body and her face during sex and in Nadine's shots, we mostly see her touching parts 

of her body and her gaze at the man while he is masturbating. Regarding the depiction of characters' 

sexual tendencies throughout the film (Manu is always dominant, Nadine is rather passive and most 

importantly a voyeur), this sequence is significant because, after the moment they met, it is the only 

time we do not see them in the same room when engaged in sexual activity. In other words, the film 

does not exhibit their sexual experiences separately in the film's narration, even when they perform a 

sexual activity alone and in different places. By this way, this scene adverts and contrasts their 

different sexualities and describes how their individualities embark and then interact with the 

relationship between each other. Therefore, ‘the visibility’ in this scene might be a result of adopting 

a hard-core porn aesthetic, however more importantly it is that visibility that exposes the sexual 

difference between the women and emphasizes the connection between them through their self-aware 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

124 

sexual performativity rather than their connection either to those particular sexual partners or the 

sexual activity itself. Indeed, at the end of the scene, after Manu says ‘thanks’ to the man and goes 

away, there is a cut to a shot in which they are both in the car driving away, denoting that what 

happened in those separate places results in bringing them together. We can say this because the 

ellipsis between the end of the cross-cutting scene and the moment when they are in the car gives 

way to a juxtaposition of the two scenes. Baise Moi takes ‘the visible’ of hard-core porn that is 

supposedly based on the activity of ‘doing what comes naturally’ in Williams’ ironic words, adopting 

the phallocentric perspective that originates from the oppression of sexuality. This adoption enables 

the film to portray how sexual performativity can function as a homosocial connection point and the 

sexual differences between the characters underline both the fluidity of their sexualities and their 

awareness of performative aspects of such sexually visible ascriptions; rather than showing ‘the sex 

we know’ that is based on the idea of a universal sexual drive.  

Furthermore, at the end of this cross-cutting scene we do not see the process of ejaculations of each 

man. In the mainstream heterosexual narrative of hard-core porn, that process takes an important 

place to show ‘the visibility’ of pleasure at its climactic state. In Baise Moi, we see the seminal fluid 

that let us know that the men ejaculated but we do not know when and how exactly that happened. 

By way of excluding that essential part of hard-core porn, the sex scenes in Baise Moi do not 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 125 

conform to the mainstream porn narrative. We only see ‘the afters’ of the ejaculations of men which 

are located in the cross-cutting scene through which the film binds these ‘afters’ to each other, 

highlighting Manu and Nadine's interactions with these ‘afters’, rather than centralizing any kind of 

depiction of orgasm on screen. Williams in a later article on body genres describes ‘the body 

spectacle’ in porn genre as a representation site that casts portrayal of orgasm in its most sensational 

form (Williams 1991, 4). This sensational fiction is what Baise Moi discards within its adoption of 

pornographic organizing on screen. Its close-ups are the methods of interrupting the composite model 

of that body spectacle by way of switching back and forth between different hard-core portrayals of 

sexualities. The orgasm in Baise Moi is not one, or two, it is not there to present the constructed 

visibility of pleasure indebted to hard-core porn. This absence of the moments of orgasm but the 

presence of sexual activity can be interpreted as what Downing refers to as ‘the manipulation of the 

gaze’: plurality of sexuality is what Baise Moi predominantly shows whereby excavating the 

constructed ‘male gaze’ required by hard-core porn from its own pornographic aesthetic and 

sensational fictionalization of the female body.  

Alternative readings of non-simulated sex would benefit from delving into why Baise Moi does not 

provide a suggestion for how female sexuality should be represented or dragged into the territory of 

‘the representable’. In fact, the film strives to utilize bodily possibilities and does not attach direct 

subjection of feminist politics to the sexual experiences of its protagonists. With the help of Judith 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

126 

Butler's analysis of how feminist discourse reapplies the subjection methods of power if it insists on 

the existence of a naturally sexed human, I have established in the first part that the feminist struggle 

for true representation might not be productive for emancipation since the subjects are formed to fit 

in the representational politics of power. In this respect, I argued that Baise Moi, with its characters' 

habits of promiscuity, masturbation, searching for sexual pleasure and finally by individualizing 

these habits with explicit depictions; does not try to represent a certain subject of feminism that has 

been already constituted by power relations in society. Rather, the film self-parodies the possible 

individual reactions to heteronormative culture in which the oppression of sexuality locates sexual 

habits, like Manu and Nadine's, at the bottom of ‘the hierarchical system of sexual value’ described 

by Gayle Rubin in her influential text Thinking Sex, as an oppressive pyramid deep-seated within 

social structures (Rubin 1992, 279). The subversion of the norms prescribed by the hard-core fiction 

around female sexuality functions on the visual level via the organization of the scenes. This is why 

the narrative ending does not necessarily impair the film’s ironic aesthetics: the film pushes the 

borders of “the representable” subjects via activating its critique through pornographic aesthetics 

while not still keeping its story within the borders of the legal. It needs the ‘bad ending’ to 

disassociate itself from a utopic project only to push the borders of the genre by dislocating its sexual 

idealism as failure and absence. This boosts the emphasis on individual interpretation rather than a 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 127 

climaxed narrative around how female sexuality should look like and enables the viewer to envision 

the attainability of different sexualities that do not seek to utilize representational politics of gender. 

This can be read as a form of resistance against the visual structures of power that create the illusion 

that there exists a natural heterosexual core in everyone, promote the binary sex to affirm its viability 

and produce porn to regulate what can be visible.  

 
REFERENCES 
Archer, N. (2009). ‘Baise-Moi’: The Art of Going Too Far. E-Pisteme, 2, 67-77. 
 
Brown, B. (1981). A Feminist Interest in Pornography — Some Modest Proposals, m/f, 5/6: 5-18 
 
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. 
 
Despentes, V. (2009) ‘Interview by Alan Kelly’, 3Ammagazine. 
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/virginie-despentes-interviewed [accessed 21 August 2013] 
 
Downing, L. (2004). French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’: Postmodern Porn and Troubled 
Genre. French Cultural Studies, 15(3), 265-280. 
 
Downing, L. (2009). Pornography and the ethics of censorship. In L. Downing and L, Saxton. 
(Eds.), Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (84-98). Routledge. 
 
Eisenstein, Z. R., (1988) The Female Body and the Law. The University California Press. 
 
Erensoy, Ş. F. (2020). Rethinking Pornography within the Context of the New French Extremity: The 
Case of Baise-Moi. CINEJ Cinema Journal, 8(1), 60-86. 
 
Foucault, M.(1978), The History of Sexuality, trans. by R. Hurley. Pantheon Books. 
 
Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. Critical inquiry, 8(4), 777-795. 
 



 

 

CINEJ Cinema Journal: Temmuz Süreyya Gürbüz 

 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321   | http://cinej.pitt.edu 

128 

Franco, J. (2003). Gender, Genre and Female Pleasure in the Contemporary Revenge Narrative: 
Baise moi and what it feels like for a girl. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 21(1), 1-10. 
 
Hall, S. (1997). The Work of Representation. In S. Hall (Ed.), Representation: Cultural 
Representations and Signifying Practices (13-74). Sage.  
 
Irigaray, L. (1997). The Sex Which Is Not One. In C. Katie, and others, Writing on the Body: Female 
Embodiment and Feminist Theory (248-256). Columbia University Press.  
 
Kuhn, A. (1997). The Body and Cinema: Some Problems for Feminism. In K. Conboy, N. Medina 
and S. Stanbury (Eds.), Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (195-208). 
Columbia University Press.  
 
McKenzie, S. (2002). Baise-moi, Feminist Cinemas and the Censorship Controversy, in Screen, 
43(3): 315-324. 
 
Nettleback, C. (2003). Self-Constructing Women: Beyond the Shock of Baise Moi and A ma Seuor!, 
in Flinders University Languages Group Online Review, 1(3): 58-68. 
 
Quandt, J. (2011). Flesh and Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema. In T. Horeck and T, 
Kendall (Eds.), The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (18-25). Edinburgh 
University Press.  
 
Rolling Stone (2014). ‘Barely Legal: 30 Nearly Pornographic Mainstream Films’, 
<http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/pictures/barely-legal-30-nearly-pornographic-mainstream-
films-20140318> [accessed 31 Jan. 2017] 
 
Romney, Jonathan, ‘Le Sex and Violence’, The Independent, (2004). 
 
Rubin, G. (1992). Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality. In C. S. 
Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (267-320). Pandora Press.  
 
Wimmer, L. (2011) “Sex and Violence from a Pair of Furies”: The Scandal of Baise Moi. In T. 
Horeck and T, Kendall (Eds.), The New Extremism in Cinema: From France to Europe (130-142). 
Edinburgh University Press. 



 

  CINEJ Cinema Journal: Some Problems with Gendered Subjectivity and Representation 
Volume 9.2 (2021)   |   ISSN 2158-8724 (online) |   DOI 10.5195/cinej.2021.321 | http://cinej.pitt.edu 129 

 
Williams, L. (1989). Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible". University of 
California Press. 
 
Williams, L. (1991). Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess. Film quarterly, 44(4), 2-13. 
 
Filmography 
A Ma Seour!, Dir. Catherine Breillat, Criterion, 2004 
 
Baise Moi, Dir. Virginie Despentes and Carolie Trinh Thi, Pan Europeénne, 2000 
 
Fatal Attraction, Dir. Adrian Lyne, Paramount Pictures, 1987 
 
Irreversible, Dir. Gaspar Noé, Lions Gate, 2002 
 
Romance, Dir. Catherine Breillat, Lions Gate, 2002 
 
Scarface, Dir. Brian De Palma, Universal Pictures, 1983 
 
Thelma and Louise, Dir. Ridley Scott, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 1991