Les Mouflettes d’Atropos : une contre-narration de la prostitution

Chloé Delaume began her literary career in Citation2000 with Les Mouflettes d’Atropos: this inaugural autofiction dramatizes the experience of sex work and is based on the author’s personal experience from her early twenties, when she chose to ‘rent out [her] body rather than [her] brain’ to earn a living. Through the concept of ‘counter-narration’, this article offers a rereading of the Delaumien’s narrative to highlight how it undermines preconceived representations of prostitution. The narrator’s view of prostitution reveals the flaws in the dominant discourse, demystify, parody, divert or contradict such discourse. Therefore, the author’s first book, in its own experimental style, achieves an eminently political de-focusing: writing from personal experience, using a fresh point on view, breaks with the image and the clichés about prostitution, as they are conveyed by a moralistic doxa that still prevails at the dawn of the twenty first century.