King Kong Theory. Neither theory, nor feminist

Abstract

Virginie Despentes in King Kong Theory, her most famous work, seduces the reader from the beginning manifesto through a crude story about her own life, troubled by a rape happened during her youth. Leaving aside the commercial success of the book —sixteen years after its publication, new editions still run out— our goal is to analyze from a feminist perspective not only the content of the work, but also the reasoning behind of a system that keeps advertising the text as “one of the most important books of feminism”, as well as the conflict that appears when considering an autobiographical story as theory itself. Through an exhaustive analysis of the text, led by the conceptual frame provided by radical feminist theory and, therefore, its main concepts of the system sex-gender, rape culture and commodification and control of women´s bodies in the patriarchal system, we will point out how the author romanticizes and even defends those industries related to sexual exploitation: pornography and prostitution.