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ralowe's review against another edition
3.0
although i've recieved multiple assurances to the contrary, i don't buy that idealization could possibly be such an out-of-control issue in the academy. i read everything with suspicion. it's kind of a problem with me. i don't know if i'm actually gratified by finding flaws in things. i'm pretty sure it's an impersonal heuristic or something like that. kadji amin is particularly fixated on the role the figure of jean genet plays in the tendency toward queer theorization of sexual desire as prefigurative, liberatory, utopian and socially transformative. anyone who's ever experienced sexual desire immediately knows otherwise. any approximation of that is surely fleeting. i get foucault and bersani about sex and power; i really want to imagine another kind of sex premised on mutuality. amin takes a huge chance with this book, bringing queer theory and pederasty together; but because i've never idealized sex i was left kind of uncomfortable with the weight and shadow of the immense and never fully investigated implications here for consent. that is until the question of consent is taken up in this really amazing part on genet and FHAR's racial fetishization. the parts of this book that have little to actually do literally with pederasty are perhaps the most stimulating engagement i've had with any text for almost as long as i can remember. i became irretrievably absorbed in amin's contemplation on the carceral nonchronological time of the racially fetishized, and thought immediately of *corregidora*; the quote from sharon holland's amazing work in *the erotic life of racism* of the raced body "mired in space"ќ. amin is fully immersed in this frustratingly open radical queer feminist question about the relation of desire and ethics. amin rejects the queer theorization that any and all expressions of sexual desire invariably are or might be working progressively toward some greater ethical good. again, i have no idea where anyone might be getting that from. the guiding straw concern that opposition is a choice misrepresents genet's actual biography and kind of disappears the panthers and palestinians he lusted after, as if they could never have chosen deviant desire or that they were doing it all just for opposition's sake. i'm not convinced that the point of oppositional labor is merely to produce a "subject of oppositionality."ќ
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