Living as writing as living: queer praxis in Constance Debré’s autofictions.

In both her life and her writing, Constance Debré challenges the conventional norms of gender, class and identity. In her 2018 work, <italic>Play boy</italic>, Debré intertwines her personal and literary coming out as a lesbian, marking a radical departure from the life she had been living until that point. In her subsequent works, <italic>Love Me Tender</italic> (2020) and <italic>Nom</italic> (2022), Debré further rejects traditional roles related to family, career and motherhood. This article examines Debré’s engagement with queer praxis as an author, interpreting this trilogy as a counter-narrative that resists dominant cultural scripts, particularly those tied to heteronormativity and bourgeois values. By foregrounding her rejection of societal norms, Debré constructs a narrative of autonomy that challenges fixed identities and advocates for an ambiguous freedom found in solitude. Through her ongoing life-writing project, Debré crafts an antinormative self-portrait and offers an alternative vision of individual experience living within and against societal structures. This approach provides a critical lens for examining the role queer praxis plays in life writing, situating Debré within broader discussions of resistance in contemporary French autofiction as she disrupts gendered, sexual and class-based expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]