Ever since Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, diary novels for young readers have become increasingly popular. In narrative terms, these works are characterized by the special relationship between the writing/remembering and the experiencing self; the simultaneity of narration and experience; and the alternation between narrative and dramatic mode. In terms of formal aesthetics, what stands out most in more recent diary novels are the diverse relationships between text, image, (hand-)writing, layout, and materiality. As metanarrative works, these diary fictions explore the forms and conditions of (adolescent) biographical writing between intimacy and publicity, analog and digital media, and forms of expression in both societal and youth cultural contexts. But the practice of writing is also, as some works clearly show, performative: In writing, the subject constitutes itself, whereby social norms and scripts are reproduced as well as contested. As this paper aims to show by means of genre- and gender-theoretical analyses, this performativity is productive especially regarding gender. The subject discourses which are negotiated in recent (graphic) diary novels reflect conflicting gender debates: critical explorations of gender as a societal construct and the expectations and performances that are tied to ‚femininity‘ and ‚masculinity‘ are juxtaposed with the naturalization of gender(-norms); individualizing, postfeminist technologies of the self inscribe themselves into the quests for identity, but are also undermined; and last but not least, (hetero-)normative life narratives are reproduced as well as deconstructed.