Locating Consensual Biofiction: Grenre, Ethics, and Fictionalising the Life Stories of Others

This creative practice thesis comprises a dissertation, 'Locating Consensual Biofiction: Genre, Ethics, and Fictionalising the Life Stories of Others', and a creative project written in the emergent genre of consensual biofiction, which this thesis names and defines as a form of biographical fiction written with the consent and participation of the person whose life the work portrays. Drawing from feminist ethicist Margaret Urban Walker's 'expressive-collaborative' understanding of morality as a 'socially embodied medium of understanding and negotiation over responsibility for things open to human care and response', the combined analytical and creative components of this research offer insight into an area of literary activity concerned with the effects of author-subject relational ethics on fiction projects drawn from the life stories of living subjects. The novel that accompanies this thesis, 'Behind the Back of God' (from a Hungarian idiom meaning far, far away), uses consensual biofiction to adapt the life story of a woman who migrated from Hungary to Australia as a political dissident just prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain. The novel, both in its narrative content and in the ways the author-subject relationship has influenced creative decision-making in its writing, explores the situated intersection of systemic constraints and personal convictions in embodied negotiations of freedom and commitments to care. 'Locating Consensual Biofiction' discusses manifestations of consensual biofiction in works such as Colum McCann’s 'Apeirogon' (2020), Julia Alvarez's 'In the Time of the Butterflies' (1994, 2019), and Dave Eggers's 'What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, a Novel' (2006), and proposes 'consensual biofiction' as a term that provides insight into the origins and authenticity claims of fictional texts adapted from life stories. It argues that the genre-based expectations of consensual biofiction arise from a combination of uses of the real in tandem with contemporary understandings of human rights, literary ethics, and ethical consumerism. In this light, consensual biofiction offers writers and living subjects of fiction projects a cooperative model that aims for mutual beneficence, as well as leveraging the affective powers of fiction to foster reader engagement with ongoing issues of social justice