Overview
This study of Jean Genet demonstrates that his writings have much to tell us about the questions of identity, sex, gender, and politics that haunt us today. Indeed, Queens and Revolutionaries proposes new readings of his work that focus on the two areas which Sartre's Saint Genet does not adequately address: sex and politics. The book first demonstrates how Sartre's analyses, because of their uncritical reliance on a range of binary oppositions, fail to do justice to the complex interplay of agency and determinism in Genet's novels of the 1940s and fail to understand how Genet's erotic vision challenges and ultimately undoes the hierarchies and structures through which gender is usually constructed. Using recent feminist and gender theory - from Helene Cixous's notion of feminine writing to Judith Butler's theories of performative gender - to elucidate the fluctuations, oscillations, and reversals in Genet's representations of cross-dressing and homosexuality, the readings show how these representations in turn reveal those theories' limitations and encourage a re-invitation of Lacan's work on the veiled phallus.The second half of the book turns to lesser-known texts dating from the late 1960s onward, and to the posthumously published Prisoner of Love, in order to contest Sartre's insistence on the nonpolitical nature of Genet's work. It examines Genet's writing on the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, highlighting his political engagement and support of these groups after May '68. It also traces the continuities from his earlier work linking, for example, the aesthetics of transvestism with the aesthetics of post-'68 revolutionary movements, and showing how revolutionaryaesthetics, theatricality, and performance are now increasingly reconceptualized as explicitly political acts and related to the politics of "camp" developed in the earlier texts - but that Genet is nonetheless not without recognizing the importance of the material aspects of the struggl