The Marseille-based publishing house Images Plurielles has published Benzine Cyprine by Kamille Lévêque Jégo.
“Benzine Cyprine is a gang of women with sharp tongues and strong characters. A caustic outlet driven by a cultural and social observation of the female gender that bordered on despondency. Rather than succumbing to this feeling, I preferred to showcase a feminine identity that could counterbalance the conventional wisdom underlying the concept of ‘femininity’. I chose to celebrate a virile and flamboyant feminine identity by employing a farce steeped in unapologetic irony and by mimicking the documentary genre. This satirical immersion into the daily lives and lifestyle of Benzine Cyprine serves as a pretext to highlight the influence of symbols and figurative choices on the archetypal construction of gender identities.
Somewhere between a work of art and a nod to fanzine culture, ‘Benzine Cyprine’ is the definitive documentary on this all-female gang. Opening the pages of this book is like being invited or even initiated into this group with its sweet yet sharp edge. Benzine Cyprine is a long-form documentary about a gang of women of the same name. It is also a symbol of identity.
Through the everyday moments of the women who make up this gang, their personalities, attitudes and words, this project highlights the clichés that perpetuate an existential unease surrounding the fact of being female. In a satirical tone, it challenges the preconceptions that alienate women’s existence and perpetuate violence and oppressive stigmatisation against the female gender. Yet here, rather than confining women to a status of victimhood by definition, the flamboyant personalities of the Benzine Cyprine serve as symbols of a distinct feminine identity that inspires both sensuality and virility. These rebellious incarnations run counter to the saccharine, complacent and hypersexualised female figures that saturated the media (big and small screens, the press, advertising). The gang, as described here, acts as an identity group. It offers validation, respect, cohesion and the strength to make demands, in stark contrast to a sense of vulnerability.
The Benzine Cyprine are this explosive cocktail that represents a desire for access to pleasure and emancipation by expressing one’s individuality with supreme confidence. They show that one can find one’s own way of embodying one’s gender beyond the constraints tied to one’s sex. But nowadays this approach is neither spontaneous nor innate. It is constructed; it is influenced.
Benzine Cyprine are deliberately marketed as a gender-specific brand. The aim is to generate enthusiasm and pride in the mindset they represent. The mockumentary is deliberately mimicked by promoting this feminine identity through the same techniques borrowed from advertising (seductive aesthetics, graphic design, slogans, projection into reality, etc.). The book Benzine Cyprine cultivates this ambiguity in order to project, onto a familiar reality, an expression of spectacular and inspiring femininity. For fiction and its sensationalism also influence the way we imagine our future and question reality.”
Kamille Lévêque Jégo
Kamille Lévêque Jégo – Benzine Cyprine
19 x 24 cm, 132 colour and black-and-white photographs
Hardback, sewn binding and poster
Texts in French and English
Retail price: €38
ISBN: 978-2-9194368-8-0
www.imagesplurielles.com
Published with the support of the French Region Occitanie, 2025.
