The minor as major: Outsiderness and social class in Saara Turunen’s prose

Abstract

Saara Turunen’s Sivuhenkilö is a work of autofiction, which tells the story of a year in its unnamed protagonist’s life. Despite her success as an author, the protagonist feels like a minor character in her own life: an outsider both because of her gender and her profession as a writer. In this article, I offer a critical reading of Turunen’s prose by asking what political implications are attached to her handling of outsiderness. I approach outsiderness not merely as a theme, but also as a genre-specific feature peculiar to the tradition of feminist rewriting. Based on my reading of Sivuhenkilö, I argue that regardless of its feminist potential, framing oneself as an outsider can function as a way of smoothing out differences and privileges, such as social class. Following this, I argue that the feminist stance explicitly presented in the novel is strongly connected to liberal and popular feminism.