Queer autofiction as reparative practice: Coming out in literature

Zooming in on a postsocialist piece of queer autofiction, namely the 2022 novel Dezrădăcinare (Uprootedness) penned by the Moldovan-Romanian female author Sașa Zare, this article analyzes the role of self-writing as reparative practice operating on textual and extratextual levels. Instead of engaging directly with queer theory and performing a close reading of Zare’s work, we opted for “queering” the various contexts that labeled the book: historical, political, literary. This operation bridges between different theoretical articulations of reparative writing and reading, and facilitates the discussion of gendered and queer experiences in a more comprehensive framework, by connecting personal identity and sexuality with the post-Cold War social and cultural transformations in Central Eastern Europe, while re-localizing queer reparative practices in the East. We argue that queer identity complicates the narrator’s/author’s troubling geocultural positioning, one pendulating between Moldova and Romania, while simultaneously empowering her to undertake a reparative and self-affirmative process through writing. We conclude that coming out through literature has an interventionist function by opening new ways for marginalized groups to express themselves in the dominant culture.