Autofiction as a Site of Resistance: Reclaiming Agency in Contemporary Women's Writings

Abstract

This article examines how contemporary autofiction, particularly by women writers, functions as a site of resistance against gendered literary and cultural norms by disrupting the binary between the personal and the public. Focusing on Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997) and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014), I argue that these novels employ autofictional techniques such as blending fact and fiction, fragmented narrative structures, formal experimentation, author-character overlap, and heightened emotional expression. I explore how these strategies enable women writers to politicize personal experiences while maintaining protective ambiguity. Ultimately, I contend that these works demonstrate how autofiction allows women to write themselves into the literary field by challenging conventions of authorship, genre, and gender roles. Autofiction’s genre-defying innovations thus operate not only as stylistic and meaning-making practices but also as feminist strategies for reclaiming agency and reshaping dominant cultural narratives.