Autofiction as Disaffiliation: Body, Class, and Transgression in Constance Debré’s “Love Me Tender”

Abstract

In Love Me Tender (2020), Constance Debré orchestrates a radical literary deconstruction of identity assignations. Through an autofiction that is both raw and stylized, she performs a triple transgression: abandonment of motherhood, rejection of bourgeois heritage, and assertion of non-normative lesbian sexuality. Far from confessional testimony, her dry, fragmented writing challenges the codes of “feminine” autofiction as much as the expectations of her original social milieu. Debré’s originality lies in her strategy of aesthetic disaffiliation: by neutralizing any justificatory emotion, she transforms social provocation (losing custody of her son, embracing precarity) into literary material. Her minimalist style simultaneously subverts gender and class norms. By rejecting both pathos and militancy, she makes writing a laboratory of “impossible” identities, where freedom is won through shedding roles (mother, wife, bourgeois woman) and dominant narratives. Ultimately, this work questions literature’s capacity to reconfigure power relations. By positioning its analysis at the intersection of Bourdieu’s (symbolic violence), Jaquet’s (transclass) and Butler’s (gender performativity) theories, this article demonstrates how Debré pushes autofiction beyond confession: her text doesn’t describe emancipation, it embodies it through its very structure, making disidentification both a political and poetic act.