An Unsavory Saint

A Deidealized Genet and the Future of Queer Studies

A review of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History by Kadji Amin (Duke University Press, 2017) by Frieda Ekotto

Jean Genet was born in Paris on December 19, 1910, but as a ward of assistance publique, he knew nothing about his background until, at the age of twenty-one, he obtained his birth certificate. It confirmed his mother’s name as Gabrielle Genet, although his father remained unknown.^[1] This personal history caused Genet to describe his birth as an accident, and his life project became to transform this accident into necessity.

In the years since his death, he has emerged as an idealized queer, criminal, anticolonial outsider. Yet, for all Genet’s counterculture cachet, his biography contains much that is less than ideal. In Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History, Kadji Amin focuses upon the more discomforting elements of Genet’s life to examine fundamental practices in Queer Studies and create a work of breathtaking relevance. By departing from notions of queerness that merely mean “nonnormative,” Amin offers a model for Queer Studies that does not content itself with simplified ideals or icons. Rather, by focusing upon aspects of Genet’s biography that create “unease” and by insisting on a critical historicization of sexuality, Amin suggests how Queer Studies can be transformed into new transnational and geopolitical formations.

Amin begins his thought-provoking introduction by detailing his early work on Genet. Like many others, he first considered Genet to be “an object for Queer Studies in its utopian, coalitional mode” (4), but, as he dug more deeply, he found himself “disturbed,” particularly by Genet’s pederasty and racial fetishizing (5). Rather than stopping his work on Genet, however, or ignoring the more unsavory elements of Genet’s biography, as many have done, Amin had the insight to concentrate upon the very issues that troubled him. In so doing, he came to realize that addressing difficult topics, such as race and power, could broaden and deepen Queer Studies’ impact.

Amin begins by addressing Genet and modern pederasty. This allows him to examine how historical subjects are either idealized or silenced in the creation of “comfortable” narratives. To counteract this, Amin historicizes pederasty, which has remained othered as either something belonging to the past, that is, Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy, or something belonging elsewhere, that is, the Arab-Islamic world or within disciplinary institutions. Amin both challenges this marginalization and defines it more broadly, as any male same-sex relationship. This allows him to consider how age differences are eroticized and how they can be the basis of relationships (39). These twin threads—of Genet and of modern pederasty—thus become the lens through which we can see how historical subjects are either idealized or silenced in the creation of “comfortable” narratives.

Amin addresses four other aspects of Genet that cause unease—nostalgia for prison, racialized attraction, pederastic kinship, and hatred of the state. Through them, Amin proposes a practice of deidealization that mines these disturbing attachments for what they can tell us about the methodological and theoretical bases of Queer Studies and coalition building. It is a means of coming to terms with a figure like Genet who “spoils every ideal” and resists easy categorization as either saint or antihero (9). Most important, Amin’s illuminating deidealization demonstrates that there is a spectrum between idealization and critique.

For example, Amin understands Genet’s nostalgia for Mettray, a penal colony for boys where he was incarcerated as an adolescent, as a kind of mixture of trauma and pleasure that was emblematic of contemporary queer modes of life. This mixture, which Amin terms “commingled affects,” can be defined as “bodily intensities that have not been granted social meaning or assigned particular narratives as emotions.” When Genet wrote Miracle of the Rose in 1946, it was after Mettray’s closure in 1939, when, in the wake of public discourse on abuse and corruption that attended such institutions, the prison had been romanticized as a place where childhood innocence was lost. In Miracle of the Rose, criminals and condemned men are treated as saints so that their numinous reality may find its way into Genet’s being, he who is already king of an imaginary realm. In Amin’s reading, to render Mettray a paradise is to create a model for a “queer disposition toward history that neither turns away in horror from the traumas of the queer past nor seeks to recuperate them through a progress narrative of sexual emancipation” (73). Further, it lends itself to a reading in line with Amin’s project of historicizing modern pederasty. It allows us to consider the possibility of a “pedaristic paradise” before the emancipatory break of gay liberation (72–73).

The next unease Amin works through is the racial fetishism that seems to underlie Genet’s work with the Black Panthers and Palestinians. While existing scholarship does not always see Genet’s racialized eroticism in the same light, Amin argues that it nevertheless all attempts to “redeem it via a temporal progress narrative that poses it as leading to principled political coalition” (81, emphasis in original). Instead, Amin discusses the temporality of desire and, in his subsequent readings of Genet’s political coalition-building with the Panthers and the Palestinian cause, presents a coterminous temporality for this racial fetishism that “resonate[s] or interfere[s]” with the temporalities of political transformation (105). In other words, Amin is continuing his critical historicization of sexuality, which allows for multiple temporalities that do not lend themselves easily to narratives of progress, liberation, and emancipation.

In chapter 4, Amin asks the critical question “How are we to read Genet’s repeated pattern of insinuating himself into the intimate domesticity of heterosexual couples . . . [and] of intentionally perpetuating the regime of heterosexual kinship, property, and domesticity in order to cultivate a place for himself at the edges of it?” (111). This allows Amin to address “pederastic kinship,” as a “constitutively impure form,” and to expand our understanding of what queer families are. They are neither the “chosen family” of the neoliberal postgay liberation era nor the model of the nuclear family without many of the same rights as a heterosexual nuclear family. Neither sacralizing choice nor decrying the inequalities that structure family, this examination of pederasty reveals precisely how it is hard to distinguish “kinship from domination, coercion from care” in any family, queer or otherwise (139).

An interesting twist in Amin’s reading of “pederastic kinship” occurs, however, in his treatment of an older Genet and his relationship with David Hilliard (and, by extension, the Black Panthers).  Hilliard, then a twenty-seven-year-old Panther chief of staff, guided Genet on his tour of America in 1970, when Genet was sixty. In their relationship, “pederastic kinship” is reversed, as Genet hails Hilliard as his mother and identifies himself as Hilliard’s son. In this form of kinship, temporality is shifted, as a younger person cares for an elder, without concern either for future filiation or for a shared past. Genet loved Hilliard as a son, or, really, as an elder in need of a mother’s—or, if one is to keep the gendered aspect, daughter’s—care. Hilliard was, and is, a member of a culture that values its youth and elders and so was willing to offer this care. In this sense, it is not surprising that they cherished each other. Genet, Amin writes, “acknowledges his relation of debt to the Panthers, both as the beneficiary of their bodily care and as one transformed by their transmission of a revolutionary alternative to racial capitalism” (137). This is a novel understanding of an older Genet, one that is not positing a progress from his younger self but instead continuing that work of historicizing and interrogating the social structuring of sexuality that is the running thread of this work.

Amin examines Genet’s relationship with the Panthers further in the fifth and final chapter on Genet’s affiliation with it and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Both of these organizations were widely covered in the Euro-American press as propagating “terrorism,” and Amin agrees with Jérôme Neutres that Genet’s support for them arose from his own estrangement and hatred of the French state that had imprisoned him (Amin, 144). Amin considers Genet’s desire to align with nonnational radical groups advocating violence against the state as a kind of limited oppositional politics. He writes, “[Genet’s] position is at once unquestionably radical, in its advocacy of violence and categorical opposition to the nation-state system, and yet curiously apolitical, in its avowed desire that the world not change so that he might continue to be against it” (175). This reading of Genet’s political commitments is a way to examine what is meant by queer coalitional politics and leads to a larger, concluding interrogation of the very meaning of “queer” for Queer Studies. Amin’s thus pushes back against an anti-identitarian catchall category of queer and instead posits a definition of queer that interrogates identity as well as the costs of coalition building across nonnormative identities.

While foundations scholars such as Leo Bersani have made similar arguments, Amin is doing the important work of addressing race and colonialism head on and pointing to the fact that, while many Queer scholarship supports a neoliberal, antifascist agenda, it often comes from a place of (American and British) elite, white privilege, which itself must be acknowledged and critiqued. In critiquing Genet’s writings and activism, as well as subsequent scholarship about his life and work, Amin draws our attention to these critical and discursive structures, which are often obscured from view.

At the core of Genet’s work is an understanding of the human price of being an outcast. This human cost, which, when he is an active agent in its perpetuation, becomes the unsettling aspects of Genet’s biography. Amin’s practice of addressing this allows him to mine Genet’s “disturbing attachments” for what they can tell us about the methodological and theoretical bases of Queer Studies without losing view of Genet’s—and Queer Studies’—insights into to the human condition. Amin’s work is a major contribution to Queer Studies as well as a fresh way to read Jean Genet’s work in the twenty-first century.

Frieda Ekotto is the Lorna Goodison Collegiate Professor of Comparative Literature and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan. Her early work involves an interdisciplinary exploration of the interactions among philosophy, law, literature, and African cinema. She has written extensively on the work of the French writer Jean Genet as well as on African cinema and was honored for her work on African cinema at the International Film African Film Festival in Zagora, Morocco, in 2018.

Works Cited

Amin, Kadji. 2017. Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Neutres, Jérôme. 2002. Genet sur les routes du Sud. Paris: Fayard.