Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History by Kadji Amin (review)

The story of Jean Genet's critical reception reinforces the truism that one should be wary of acolytes and their influence on one's legacy. Scholars and fans of queer theory have turned to Genet as a formative figure without vetting the uneven contents of his life and convictions, rushing to premature celebrations that homogenize and idealize Genet into a "pure" queer figure. Kadji Amin inventories these hidden contents in a way that restores logic to the otherwise puzzling arc of Genet's life and its many moral and political transitions. One can make sense of them only by paying attention to histories in the plural: the history of sexuality (especially the changing notions of "acceptable" sexualities), the history of the penal colony, and the history of French imperialism (the delinquent boys of the penal colonies were being groomed to become perfect colonists, as Genet argued). Genet was himself incarcerated at the boys' penal colony of Mettray, in the center-west of France, and ambiguously looked back on this place as a breeding ground for the development of a transgressive yet restricted sexuality. Mettray was a generator of Genet's very particular erotics, because it was a space he cherished even though it lacked the freedom so often associated with sexual liberation. Amin convincingly argues that queer scholars have been prone to a certain amnesia in regard not only to Genet's history but also, more largely, to the field's own history. This is due in large part to queer studies' future-oriented razing of conventions, but also to a practiced ignorance around geographic and racial difference, factors considered too anchored to an identity politics queer studies aims to move beyond. Genet, as is well known, delighted in the erotic draw of "abjection and evil" (3), dwelling in his novels and interviews on the homoerotic power of fascism, police violence, and carceral abuse. Yet his passage from admirer to enemy of oppressive power does not make sense unless one acknowledges his own history, and his transition from a phase of sexual revolt against French domestic strictures and domestic moralities to a later phase of eroticized solidarities with the Black Panthers and Palestinians: phases that are not so much opposed as they are linked, in Amin's argument.

It is very tempting to idealize Genet as a sexual and political outlaw above conventional morality. Amin, however, recommends a practice of deidealization to guard against this temptation, making intelligible what appear to be blemishes in his political engagements: for example, Genet fetishized Arab and black bodies in a way that reactivated many tropes of sexual potency inherited from Orientalism and other discourses of colonial domination. His relationship with the German Algerian tightrope walker Abdallah Bentaga (the subject of his poem Le funambule) is one such blemish. Genet had convinced Bentaga to desert the French army (to which Bentaga had been conscripted) during the Algerian War of Independence for political reasons, but also so that Bentaga could devote himself fully to his art. Genet designed increasingly dangerous circus acts for him, until one day in Kuwait he suffered a fall that curtailed his performing career. Bentaga later committed suicide in the Paris apartment Genet had provided for him: Amin uses the tragedy of this story to illustrate the pitfalls of "pederastic dependency," or the attachment generated by age-differentiated homosexuality, an attachment from which Bentaga could not escape (9).

Those who lionize Genet as a queer model mismatch their defiance of power with his seeming love of power differentials, as evidenced in his idolization of the pederastic inegalitarianism in full evidence at the penal colony. In this way, such misrecognition of homosexualities across time periods is reminiscent of David Halperin's argument that contemporary gay-identified men tend to misidentify with ancient Greek forms of homosexuality (based on inequality) in an effort to connect to the past and give their homosexuality (based on equality) a deeper historical arc. These lionizations and idealizations...