SOURCE: Hanrahan, Mairéad. “An Erotics of Diversity: The Unsuspected Sex of Genet's Heroes.” In Flowers and Revolution: A Collection of Writings on Jean Genet, edited by Barbara Read with Ian Birchall, pp. 63-72. London: Middlesex University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Hanrahan argues that Genet's sexual symbolism serves to subvert the traditional phallic cult of desire.

Genet's second novel, Miracle de la Rose, constitutes a paean of praise to male beauty. The text recounts the narrator's relationship with a series of men whose charm on a preliminary reading seems in direct proportion to their masculinity; the more virile and phallic their appearance, the greater their fascination for Genet. But I would like to argue that, far from shoring up the cult of the phallus, Genet is profoundly subversive of the orthodoxy, most clearly articulated by Lacan, which privileges the phallus as (part-)object of desire. His writing...