ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Jean Genet's resistance to autobiography, and, in particular, to the traditional approach to reading it, stems from an insight into the imprisoning properties of autobiography. It explores how it is that an author so determined to remain outside the law, to escape being shackled by autobiography, nonetheless gets caught in its trap. Genet's self-writing, resistant as it is to giving away knowledge and power, reveals that the generic system of autobiography relies on transactions of knowledge, which ultimately represent transactions of power. Genet's prison writings reveal an insight, borne of the experience of incarceration, into the connection between having knowledge over another and having power over them. The in-between abject that Genet attempts to claim for his own self-empowerment is unpalatable to his readers, including the queer theorists who see the means to gay empowerment in Genet's use of the disgusting abject.
