ABSTRACT
Sociologists and anthropologists have traditionally regarded incest as disruptive of the family and as therefore disruptive of social order. By contrast, feminism has suggested that, paradoxical as it may seem, incest is actually produced and maintained by social order: the order of a male-dominated society. Consequently, feminists have asked fundamentally different questions from previous writers and produced answers which relate to a different set of problematics. To a certain extent the problematics of incest are those of the body of feminist work on sexual violence as a whole: issues of power, the effects of abuse on women’s perceptions of themselves, the construction of male sexuality, the popular representations of sexual crimes, and so on. So what is the relationship between this body of feminist work and the questions for feminism raised by Foucault discussed in the previous chapter? In this chapter I consider the feminist work on incest in relation to the more overtly theoretical issues between Foucault and feminism. I use the same three themes, power, sexuality and discourse. The purpose of the chapter is twofold. First I mean to suggest that the feminist analyses of incest are much more subtle than they have been given credit for. That is, by making explicit some of the implications of the feminist stance, feminist work on incest can hold its own in the face of what has been perceived by some as the threat of work such as Foucault’s. Secondly, the purpose is to suggest that the work of Foucault does pose difficult questions and that these questions can prompt a healthy reevaluation of feminist arguments. Again, therefore, I am looking for analogous arguments as well as points of divergence.
