Sex, Subjectivity and Situation: Nelly Arcan’s Existential-Phenomenological Autofiction

Quebec writer Nelly Arcan’s brief yet brilliant literary career was beleaguered early on by the revelation that, like the protagonist of her autofictional debut novel, Putain (2001; trans. Whore, 2005), Arcan had also worked as a high-class escort. The resulting mediatic male gaze unabatedly sought to reduce Arcan to the fetishised body–object. This dynamic is particularly evident in a Canadian television interview intended to promote her third novel, where discussion shifted instead to her appearance. Arcan later recounts this ordeal in her autofictional story ‘La Honte’ (translated as ‘Shame’), which appeared in her posthumous collection Burqa of Skin (2014). In this article, I explore how Arcan employs autofiction as a textual bodily counter-measure. By exploiting autofiction’s inherent undecidability, she asserts a form of subjecthood that resists fixed and reductive definition. I read this writing practice through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s analyses of women’s embodied situatedness in patriarchal culture (1944; 1947; 1949) and also her conception of literature as a vector for intersubjectival understanding (1964). I argue that Arcan uses autofiction to elaborate an existential phenomenology of the lived experience of sex work as both a positive form of subjective agency and as a challenge to masculinist corporeal control.