Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History

Description

Jean Genet (1910–1986) resonates, perhaps more than any other canonical queer figure from the pre-Stonewall past, with contemporary queer sensibilities attuned to a defiant non-normativity. Not only sexually queer, Genet was also a criminal and a social pariah, a bitter opponent of the police state, and an ally of revolutionary anticolonial movements. In Disturbing Attachments, Kadji Amin challenges the idealization of Genet as a paradigmatic figure within queer studies to illuminate the methodological dilemmas at the heart of queer theory. Pederasty, which was central to Genet's sexuality and to his passionate cross-racial and transnational political activism late in life, is among a series of problematic and outmoded queer attachments that Amin uses to deidealize and historicize queer theory. He brings the genealogy of Genet's imaginaries of attachment to bear on pressing issues within contemporary queer politics and scholarship, including prison abolition, homonationalism, and pinkwashing. Disturbing Attachments productively and provocatively unsettles queer studies by excavating the history of its affective tendencies to reveal and ultimately expand the contexts that inform the use and connotations of the term queer. Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Attachment Genealogies of Pederastic Modernity 19 2. Light of a Dead Star: The Nostalgic Modernity of Prison Pederasty 45 3. Racial Fetishism, Gay Liberation, and the Temporalities of the Erotic 76 4. Pederastic Kinship 109 5. Enemies of the State: Terrorism, Violence, and the Affective Politics of Transnational Coalition 141 Epilogue. Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory's Affective Histories 176 Notes 191 Bibliography 235 Index 249