This doctoral project examines the performance of gender, queerness, and autofiction in the works of three contemporary Francophone feminist authors: Virginie Despentes, Wendy Delorme, and Jo Güstin. Drawing on a corpus of five novels : Les chiennes savantes (1996) and Apocalypse bébé (2010) by Despentes; La Mère, la Sainte et la Putain (2012) and Quatrième génération (2007) by Delorme; and Ah Sissi, il faut souffrir pour être française ! (2019) by Güstin, the dissertation situates itself at the intersection of gender studies, queer theory, and literary studies. It argues that queer autofiction operates not merely as a mode of self-writing, but as a critical aesthetic and political dispositif that destabilizes dominant narrative, social, and epistemological norms. The study foregrounds the plurality of queer subjectivities represented in this corpus, emphasizing figures often marginalized in literary discourse, including queer women, trans characters, racialized bodies, sex workers, and socially precarious subjects. Rather than presenting coherent or idealized identities, these texts construct unstable, contradictory, and situated forms of queerness that challenge both heteronormative frameworks and normative expectations within queer communities. The dissertation further interrogates the persistence of toxic masculinity and heteronormative scripts within queer narratives, demonstrating how characters may simultaneously subvert and reproduce dominant norms. This ambivalence underscores the difficulty of escaping patriarchal structures and highlights autofiction as a space where such contradictions are not resolved but rendered visible. Central to the analysis is the articulation of violence, trauma, and intergenerational memory. Queer autofiction emerges as a privileged site for narrating sexual, social, and symbolic violence, transforming lived experience into forms of narrative resistance. A key contribution of this project lies in its theorization of the relationship between autofiction and trash aesthetics within a comparative framework. Far from mere provocation, trash is understood as an aesthetic of the margins that reclaims disqualified languages, bodies, and desires. Through vulgarity, excess, and linguistic hybridity, these texts contest literary hierarchies and redefine the boundaries of legitimacy. Ultimately, this dissertation positions queer autofiction as a site of experimentation and resistance, where marginality becomes narrative authority and writing itself functions as a space for reimagining identity, community, and futurity.
Mathilda Poulenay (2026) studied this question.