“Sie verlassen den heteronormativen Sektor”

Reading and talk with Jayrôme C. Robinet and Christina Ernst

The term autofiction refers to texts in which the self is set in relation to the world and society in order to render social conditionings and power relations visible. The anchoring of the “I” in the person of the author is thereby meant to guarantee the authenticity of the given portrayal—as well as its political relevance.
However, what then is the significance of fiction in telling one’s story, a story that aspires to depict reality? And is the author-subject as staged in social media as ‘authentically invented’ as their textual counterpart, the narrator? In Mein Weg von einer weißen Frau zu einem jungen Mann mit Migrationshintergrund (2019) (engl.: My path from a white woman towards a young man with a migrant background), Jayrôme C. Robinet uses the story of his transition to deconstruct supposedly stable categories of identity such as gender, origin, and age as ‘somapolitical fictions’ in the sense of Paul Preciado. With literary scholar Christina Ernst, the author and spoken word artist speaks, among other things, about the political use of autofictional self-alienation, the relation between transclasse and transgenre narratives, and about how Berlin’s queer urban history  serves as a psychogeographic foil to reflect on one’s own storytelling.  

Admission free.

The event is part of the series Spielräume der Gegenwartsliteratur organized by the research project Neighborhood in Contemporary Berlin Literature at the ZfL, which is held between April and June in cooperation with various partners in Berlin.