SOURCE: Witt, Mary Ann Frese. “Mothers and Stories: Female Presence/Power in Genet.” French Forum 14, no. 2 (May 1989): 173-86.

In the following essay, Witt argues that Genet's works have a subtextual female presence, which serves as a source of destruction for the male-ordered world he presents.

A feminist writer? It is not a label that interested Genet; it is not one that comes readily to mind in identifying the great poète maudit of our century, yet feminist theorists of the stature of Kate Millett and Hélène Cixous have so argued. Written in the heady early days of the women's movement, Millett's Sexual Politics presented Genet's work as an antidote to Lawrence, Miller and Mailer—a sign of hope that the literary “sexual counterrevolution” was at an end. Genet's homosexuality, according to Millett, allowed him an insight into the arbitrariness of sexual roles so that his queens...