Reading nonbinary capacities in Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers

Jean Genet’s semi-autobiographical avant-garde novel Our Lady of the Flowers [Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs] details the unruly life and misfit desires of the gender nonconforming street queen and sex worker Divine in 1940s Paris. In this article, I close read how Genet, as a male homosexual carceral subject, inhabits a feminine queenly imaginary in his autobiographical recounting of Divine’s life. In order to render Divine’s ‘thousand bodies,’ Genet creates a new literary subjectivity by fusing the novel form with the autobiographical genre to convey a dynamic experience of gendered fluidity, one which I argue renders a specific ‘nonbinary’ capacity – glossing David Getsy’s concept of a ‘transgender capacity’ – that complicates contemporary articulations of ‘trans’ and ‘nonbinary.’ Through an analysis of how Genet represents gender nonconforming gestures, experiences and identifications, this article expands the ambit of what can constitute a nonbinary reading of a canonical homosexual text.