ABSTRACT
Incest is an issue on which the ‘object’ has started to speak, and this book has been about the ways in which we can think about that speech. Feminism has provided a discursive space enabling survivors of incest to speak and to be heard, and the setting up of help lines and women’s centres has provided a much needed channel of communication. (Re)emerging through these efforts, the ‘subjugated knowledges’ of incest survivors have formed the foundations of the feminist understanding of incest. From these accounts of pain, courage and resistance, issues familiar from previous feminist discussions of sexual violence have arisen, and, as a consequence, the feminist analyses have placed incest within a generalised theory of patriarchal power and sexual violence, analysing it more or less according to a model of rape. Part of the task of the feminist analyses has been to highlight ‘myths’ of incest, to offer an alternative account of incest, as well as to generate statistics on the prevalence and forms of sexual abuse. In short, something we might call a ‘feminist knowledge’ has appeared and, simultaneously, the object of that knowledge: ‘incestuous abuse’.1
