OUR LADY
SPECS
- 100% cotton
- Midweight 7 oz / yd² fabric
- Unisex
- Oversized fit
- Wash cold, inside out, on gentle / Hang dry
- Made in the People's Republic of China at a factory certified by OKEO-TEX (product and environmental safety), GRS (recycling), BSCI and SLCP (workplace conditions), and the China Forest Certification Council (environmental standards).
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Jean Genet wrote the novel Our Lady of the Flowers in prison, using contraband scraps of paper. The book’s narrator, also a prisoner, cuts out the heads of criminal men from newspaper photographs. Using chewed bread as paste, the narrator fixes the photos onto a cardboard list of prison regulations on the wall of his cell.
Looking at the array of male faces, the narrator tells us, “… they may very possibly love me, for they love me only if they are monsters.”
The book centers on the life of Divine, a drag queen, and the subculture populated by various people in her orbit. (John Waters gave his performer Divine the name after reading Our Lady.) Our Lady gave visibility to groups that French society had forced into the shadows or completely underground. Genet himself, as celebrity artist, did the same. He was the son of a sex worker who spent his childhood in foster homes and became a sex worker himself while traveling around Europe.
Genet continued to highlight marginalized groups throughout his life. On assignment from Esquire, he traveled to Chicago to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Two years later, at the invitation of the Black Panthers, he returned to the US for a campus tour, during which he advocated for the prison release of Bobby Seale, and civil rights in general.
On May 1, 1970, Genet spoke to a crowd of 25,000 at Yale. During his address, now known as the “May Day Speech,” Genet said:
“… it is not a question of symbolic gestures but of real acts. And if it becomes necessary, I mean if the Black Panther Party asks it of you, you ought to desert your universities, desert your classrooms, in order to speak out across America in favor of Bobby Seale and against racism.”
