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<p>This dissertation explores the concept of <italic>agential abjection</italic> through
Jean Genet's involvement with and writings about the struggles of disenfranchised
and pathologized peoples. Following Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler has argued that
modern subjectivity requires the production of a domain of abjected beings denied
subjecthood and forced to live "unlivable" lives. "Agencies of Abjection" brings
these feminist theories of abjection to bear on the multiple coordinates of social
difference by exploring forms of abjection linked to sexuality, criminality, colonialism,
and racialization. Situating Genet within an archive that includes the writings of
former inmates of penal colonies, Francophone intellectuals, and Black Panther Party
members, I analyze both the historical forces that produce abjection and the collective
forms of agency that emerge from subaltern social forms. I find that the abjected
are often able to elaborate impure, perverse, and contingent forms of agency from
within the very institutions and discourses that would deny them subjecthood. </p><p>"Agencies
of Abjection" carefully situates Genet's writing within the discursive fields in which
it intervenes, including that of the memoirs and testimonies of former inmates of
the boys' penal colonies, of Francophone decolonizing poets and intellectuals, and
of Black Panther prison writings. This method illuminates subaltern genealogies of
thought on the problems of abjection, subjection, and subaltern agency so central
to Genet's writing. By charting the twists and turns between Genet's writing and
that of other subaltern writers of abjection, "Agencies of Abjection" reads Genet
as a thinker continually involved in a process of exchange, intervention, borrowing,
and revision concerning the specific histories and experiences of social abjection.</p>
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