Abstract

In this essay, we put forward the notion of “graphic autofictional mode”, a poetic and narratological strategy deployed by both the Chilean cartoonist Marcela Trujillo, whose alter ego is “Maliki”, author of El Diario Oscuro, and by the American cartoonist Alison Bechdel, with her graphic autofiction novel Are You My Mother?. Our hypothesis posits that the objective behind the use of the graphic autofictional mode, and the exposure of family intimacy, would be a transgression of the genealogical-filial norms established between mothers and daughters, which would allow the narrative self to be re-inscribed from multiple and shifting subject-positions, imbued with the desire to “become authors”, that is, as people who represent themselves as the creators of their own life stories, performing, as image and word, their own embodied, reflexive subjectivities, which are critical of themselves, their environment and their own genealogical matrix.

Keywords:
narratives of the self; authorship; graphic autofictional mode; mothers-daughters