Having studied law, literature, cultural studies and psychoanalysis, my current research focuses on the intersection of gender and subjectivity in contemporary literature and psychoanalysis. I'm also a writer and have published short stories as well as a novel in the Greek language. My second book of fiction is currently under publication.

My present contribution attempts an exploration of the limits between the literary genres of fiction and autofiction and how they are judged particularly for women in relation to patriarchal standards; as well as how said standards generally inform the experience of being a woman writer.


Autofiction, my main concern and methodological field of research, is a literary genre that has been greatly used by women to explore, amongst other things, aspects of patriarchal culture under which female subjectivity is consistently oppressed and suppressed, especially within contexts of heterosexually defined femininity. By virtue of its supposed exposing of women’s own stories, this kind of literature has been repeatedly dismissed as too autobiographical, feminine and often sexually explicit. On the grounds of my belief that autofiction, as fiction, as all art, is not personal in the sense of the personal being an isolated private domain of experience, and of my genuine suspicion that academically well-advertised self-reflexivity is biased against women’s writing by the same patriarchal standards that often reduce any kind of self-reflexive sharing to over-sharing, I am presenting, for lack of originality, my own story. In writing about my own limited experience as a writer of fiction, exposing personal details and encounters, I am hoping to test how much and what kind of personal reflexivity is allowed, as well as to state that, in the blurring lines of what is or has been ‘real’, fiction is not personal but that any kind of personal is pure fiction.