The Genre of Autobiography and Womenʼs Writing. The Boundaries of Gender, Genre and Politics: The Case of Lena Constante

Abstract

Autobiographical writing has acquired over the last century, especially during the first half of the 20th century, an unfavorable position in the economy of literary production, and it has been often related to a form of “feminine”, confessional writing. The cultural context during the Communist regime in Romania has reshaped the connotation of autobiographical writing, being banned outright during the Socialist-realist era, and then becoming a pivotal way of surveillance for dissidents who were imprisoned mainly for political reasons during the rule of the Communist regime. Thus, the present paper aims to follow how the biographical works of former women prisoners, with a focus on Lena Constante’s autobiographical work, have contributed to a sort of differentiation of women’s writing, mobilizing in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms a “dialectic of differentiation”.