Autofiction as a Liminal Space: An Autotheoretical Reading of Meena Kandasamy’s ‘When I Hit You’

Autofiction is an innovative literary genre that invites engagement between life and art through lived experiences in literary texts to discuss authenticity. Autotheoretical reading of a text provides a plausibility to look into a textual discourse with an angle of authentic representation. It destabilizes the boundary between view and imagination, enabling a more fluid, self-reflexive mode of storytelling. It seeks to open avenues for the critical analysis of ‘biographical autofiction’. Meena Kandasami's ‘When I Hit You’ is a similar work that incorporates personal experiences into creative works to critique and subvert Genette’s ‘veiled autofiction’ with an authenticity that creates a liminal space. It helps to provide a liminal narrative space to encounter and blur the boundaries among author, narrator, and protagonist within a heteronormative structure, as this text seeks to theorize tabooed ideas such as sexual autonomy and consent. This paper intends to highlight that writing could be an important tool against intimate partner violence (IPV) in the Indian context, where personal experience can be an instantiation of a theoretical point and act as a liminal space for reclaiming and renegotiating identity. This research offers a nuanced understanding of the Indian socioliterary context and underscores the importance of two formally related but not interchangeable ideas like autofiction and autobiographical representation in neoliberal modernity. It also opens up new possibilities for resistance and transformative discourse.