Sonja Trurnit

Sonja Trurnit received a bachelor’s degree in English Studies from the LMU Munich and University of Alberta. She graduated from the LMU Munich with a master’s degree in English Studies, focusing solely on the study of literature, in 2022. Her master’s thesis focused on the queer textuality of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992). Since fall of 2022, Sonja has held a position as research assistant at the English Department at LMU to pursue her doctoral studies and has joined the research training group "Family Matters" shortly after.

Thesis topic: "Going into Labour: Procreativity in Contemporary Life Writing and Autofiction”

At the turn of the century, certain trends became noticeable on the literary market: life writings entered the public quite prominently, showing new and unique genre developments, from autotheory to autosociobiography; simultaneously, autodiegetic narratives on questions of motherhood and mothering suddenly gained central relevance. Combining these two developments, the motherhood memoir arose, led by its polemically received precursor A Life’s Work (2001) by the acclaimed British writer Rachel Cusk. Following, many other motherhood memoirs would emerge, situating the maternal question at its focal point. Although narratives featuring mothers were nothing new, mothers finally writing themselves manifested as a self-contained, self-reflexive and uninhibited political act.
This thesis wants to seize the momentum of mother-writers publishing their own experiences, specifically considering the underlying aspect of twofold labour that is involved in the production of the very text, mothering and authorship, care work and wage work, procreation and creativity – procreativity. The tentative corpus features diverse texts which specifically engage with the theme of procreativity: Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018), Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work (2001), and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962). Although only two of the four narratives are strictly speaking life writings, the two autofictional texts similarly and evidently insert the autos (self) into the text, destabilising boundaries of genre and matter.
Considering the twofold labour that is narrated will question the potentially conducive, instead of ideology-critical, impact of mother-writers in neoliberal and late-capitalist present-day society. Although pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and queer family making have been thus far unnarratable, mother-writers have borrowed from warfare-registers to philosophy to narrate (potential) experiences. By closely reading and analysing mothering memoirs and autofictions, a "political unconscious" (Jameson) shall be extracted.