Sartre seems fascinated by Genet�s desire to have the parts of the maids played by men, as well as his transvestite characters in Our Lady of the Flowers. He believes that Genet calls into question the essence of femininity by placing it on top of the masculine identity of actors. Femininity becomes �a category of the imagination, a device for generating reveries. Anything can be a woman: a flower, an animal, an inkwell� (10). For Sartre, the illusion becomes more complex when the unreality is heightened�it would be impossible to Sartre for anyone to mistake a man for a woman. It would be too easy, he states, for an actress to fool the audience with an image of Solange. What Genet does, according to Sartre, is to heighten the unreality, to make �the woman Solange� into a theatrical illusion (9).
It is interesting to note that while the Existentialist tenet is that �existence precedes essence,� Sartre appears completely comfortable with the idea that femininity exists as a pre-existing quality of womanhood, and never questions masculinity at all. For Sartre, femininity and womanhood are one and the same. The feminine is defined by �the softness of her flesh, the languid grace of her movements and the silvery tone of her voice�all natural endowments� (9). Sartre, indeed, makes several references to �feminine� characteristics:
The grace of women is usually despised by roughnecks because it signifies weakness and submission. But here it shimmers at the surface of the great and dark force of killers�Crime becomes the secret horror of grace; grace becomes the secret softness of crime. (12-13)
Thus, womanhood is distinguished by weakness, submission, and grace. It is mutually exclusive from the identity of killer�to be a killer makes one not a woman, and vice versa. Grace is the feminine attribute, crime the masculine. Interestingly, grace is a quality while crime is an action; even masculine attributes are active while feminine ones remain passive. One does wonder, however, how the Papin sisters managed to be both female and criminal.
What Sartre misses is the performative aspect of gender itself. It is not possible for anything to be a woman, but it is possible for anything to be feminine, to take on the attributes generally assigned to women as a gender. Gender then, not sex, is the arbitrary role. If it is possible for men to take on the role of women, then it is also possible for women to also take on the role of men. Not only femininity but masculinity becomes false, becomes performance rather than being the norm from which all other critiques can radiate. Genet would seem to be questioning both masculinity and femininity, opening up the stage to the discussion of gender; Sartre just seems unable to quite grasp the idea, attributing it instead to the homosexual�s ability to �discern a secret femininity in the most male of men� (15). If every man has a hidden femininity, and the converse is that every woman has a hidden masculinity, it would follow that each sex is capable of embodying both genders at once, thereby completely discrediting the idea of gender as sex-specific.

(see, wasn't that fun to read? no? now you know why i'm not posting anything)

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