ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Catherine Raissiguier draws on a short piece by Beauvoir titled Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome (1959). This text sets out to unpack the Bardot myth and analyze the new model of women’s sexuality that it embodies. Unlike the few critical commentaries that debate whether Beauvoir is right in championing Bardot’s subversive representation of women’s sexual agency in post-war France, Raissiguier investigates what Beauvoir’s text might tell us about BB as a representational, albeit contradictory, piece of the collective construction of modern France. Raissiguier thus traces how BB ultimately could become a symbol of modern France, Bardot herself developing into an animal rights activist, whose speech acts are regularly laced with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric. Beauvoir’s text enables us, according to Raissiguier, to reflect on the recent burqini controversy in France, when Marine Le Pen reminded French people that “the French beaches are those of Bardot and Vadim” and not spaces where women went to cover up.
