Autofiction, a Poetics of Intimacy

As part of this digital residency carried out in partnership with Érudit, feminist philosopher Cécile Gagnon explored female artists' exploration of intimacy through autofiction, a powerful tool for recounting their unique experiences and constituting a powerful form of resistance, collective memory, and transformation.

Since the 1990s, many women1 1  - I use the term “women” to refer to both cis and trans women. artists have been revisiting themes traditionally associated with the private sphere—motherhood, filiation, sexuality, violence, troubled identity—inviting us to pay attention to fragmented and embodied existences, often by means of autofiction. While female narratives using “we” affirmed a collective and overtly political voice in the 1960s, today, first-person narratives using “I” to explore everyday, even mundane experiences, proliferate.

From a feminist perspective, this trend might at first seem unsettling. Have artists abandoned the feminist and political ambitions of their predecessors? Anthropologist Julie Gauthier expresses this kind of concern in her 2004 text “Women’s art: Feminine, feminist? What position has the younger generation of French artists taken?,” affirming that “the singularity of the so-called feminine may today seem glorified because it’s something of a fashion phenomenon, but tomorrow this particularity may become nothing more than a constraint.”² 2 - Julie Gauthier, “Women’s art: Feminine, feminist? What position has the younger generation of French artists taken?,” Esse 51 (Spring/Summer 2004), accessible online, (our translation). Renewed focus on the body and motherhood may thus be interpreted as a return to precisely the “female identity” that feminists in the 1960s wanted to escape. Yet, at what point does the singular cease to be a critical force and become a trap? In her text, Gauthier takes a clearly constructivist-feminist stance toward this question, positioning herself as a feminist that considers social, economic, and cultural differences between men and women as cultural constructs rather than a reflection of some supposed biological trait. Here, maternal instincts and motherly love are characteristics acquired through gendered socialization. This constructivist concept of gender—one to which I personally subscribe—still dominates in Western feminist circles.