Queens And Revolutionaries New Readings of Jean Genet

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

Pascale Gaitet grew up in Paris. She left France in the early 1980s to study at Oxford and Princeton, and is presently Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz