Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law (Sociology of Law and Crime)

225 Pages·1993·0.67 MB·English

by  Vikki Bell

INTERROGATING INCEST
Interrogating Incest explores the relationship between feminism and
the work of Michel Foucault around the specific topic of incest.
Whereas sociologists initially concerned themselves with the origins
and function of the taboo, later questions have stemmed from
feminist work in this area. These have often theorised incest within
the realm of sexual violence. Yet, important as this is, there has
been little account of how feminist work itself relates to other
ways of talking about and understanding incest.
In Interrogating Incest Vikki Bell focuses on incest and its place
in sociological theory, feminist theory and criminal law. She
discusses the argument in Foucault that incest is at a point of
tension between the deployment of alliance (kinship) and the
deployment of sexuality. In addition, she explores how the notion
of the ‘incest taboo’ might be worked back into the feminist
understanding of incest.
By examining incest from a critical Foucauldian framework
Vikki Bell considers how feminist discourse on incest itself fits
into other ways of talking about sex, and offers a detailed analysis
of the concepts of power and knowledge in relation to the Foucault-
feminist debate. Closely surveying the historical background to
incest legislation and the theoretical issues involved, she delineates
the impact of the different ways of understanding incest on the
shape of the legislation, and shows what uncomfortable questions
and important dilemmas are raised by viewing the criminalisation
of incest within the Foucauldian framework.
Vikki Bell is a Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths’ College,
University of London.
SOCIOLOGY OF LAW AND CRIME
Editors:
Maureen Cain, University of the West Indies
Carol Smart, University of Leeds
This series presents the latest critical and international
scholarship in sociology, legal theory, and criminology. Books
in the series will integrate the sociology of law and the sociology
of crime, extending beyond both disciplines to analyse the
distribution of power. Realist, critical, and postmodern
approaches will be central to the series, while the major
substantive themes will be gender, class and race as they affect
and, in turn, are shaped by legal relations. Throughout, the
series will present fresh theoretical interpretations based on the
latest empirical research. Books for early publication in the series
deal with such controversial issues as child custody, criminal
and penal policy, and alternative legal theory.
Titles in this series include:
CHILD CUSTODY AND THE POLITICS OF GENDER
Carol Smart and Selma Sevenhuijsen (eds)
FEMINISM AND THE POWER OF LAW
Carol Smart
OFFENDING WOMEN
Female Lawbreakers and the Criminal Justice System
Anne Worrall
FEMININITY IN DISSENT
Alison Young
JURISPRUDENCE AS IDEOLOGY
Valerie Kerruish
THE MYTHOLOGY OF MODERN LAW
Peter Fitzpatrick
INTERROGATING
INCEST
Feminism, Foucault and the Law
Vikki Bell
London and New York
First published 1993
by Routledge,
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1993 Vikki Bell
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bell, Vikki, 1967–
Interrogating incest: feminism, Foucault and the law/Vikki Bell.
p. cm.—(Sociology of law and crime)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Incest. 2. Feminist theory. 3. Sex crimes. 4. Foucault,
Michel. I. Title. II. Series.
HQ71.B32 1993
306.877–dc20
ISBN 0-203-41018-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-71842-9 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-415-07951-9 (Print Edition)
0-415-10104-2 (pbk)
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Series editors’ preface xi
Acknowledgements xiii
1 INTRODUCTION: INTERROGATING INCEST 1
2 A CONTINUAL CONTEST: FOUCAULT
AND FEMINISM 14
3 FAMILIAR STORIES: THE FEMINIST
ANALYSES OF INCEST 57
4 TELLING AND TABOO: FEMINISM WITHIN
THE FOUCAULDIAN LANDSCAPE 92
5 WHAT’S THE PROBLEM? THE CONSTRUCTION
AND CRIMINALISATION OF INCEST 126
6 MAKING MONSTERS, LOCATING SEX:
FOUCAULT AND FEMINISM IN DEBATE 150
7 CONCLUSION 174
Appendix I: The law of incest in Britain 186
Appendix II: List of parliamentary debates 189
Notes 190
Bibliography 197
Index 207

PREFACE

The more I read, and the more that women talked to me
about their experiences, the more it became clear that not
only was I looking at father-daughter rape, but also at a
phenomenon of epic proportions…an enormous proportion
of girl-children raped, molested, abused and used by their
father, stepfather, de facto father, grandfather, uncle,
brother; the whole hidden from view by the resounding
silence of the ‘incest taboo’.
(Ward, 1984:3)
This book arises out of the observation that within feminism
incest has been subsumed under a discussion of sexual violence,
which, whilst politically important, has meant that not much
time has been spent considering how feminist work relates to
other ways of talking about incest. These other ‘understandings’
of incest have been depicted as myths that maintain a silence
about the realities of sexual abuse within the household. The
notion of the incest taboo and the issue of consensual incest,
which once attracted the attention of the ‘founding fathers’ of
sociology, have been defined out of the remit of the feminist
work, not because of a refusal to acknowledge their existence,
but because they have not presented themselves as feminist
issues. But suppose we put the feminist work ‘back’ into the
sociological debates around incest. How would a feminist
perspective refigure those sociological debates? What impact
would such an exercise have on the feminist position?
In 1989 the Sunday Mirror reported the following case, that of
a woman who
ditched her husband and deserted her family to start a new
life with her father…. She said: ‘it seemed the most natural
vii
INTERROGATING INCEST
thing in the world to make love’…. The illicit lovers survived
a most terrifying trial for incest to become Britain’s most
bizarre couple…. The judge at Chelmsford Crown Court
dismissed the case after [the woman’s] lawyers claimed that
her mother had had many other lovers who could have
fathered her…. ‘At the trial the judge warned us not to
have any children. Obviously he was concerned that any
child might be handicapped. I think fate made sure I had
a perfect child.’
(Sunday Mirror, 5.3.1989)
What strikes me about this case is the way in which the wrong of
incest is understood. The woman appeals to the powerful discourse
of romantic love in her presentation of the events, stating that
although ‘I see now that what we did was a sin’, at the time she did
not see it as wrong because, from her perspective, it was not ‘incest’
but an instance of adult sexuality: ‘It was not like father and
daughter at all. He was a man and I was a woman.’ The English
legal system, on the other hand, is working with an understanding
of incest that does not consider love or consent to be relevant issues.
The dismissal of the case was not condoning their relationship but,
by casting doubt on the man’s paternity, denying it was incest at all.
At the same time, the judge, hedging his bets, advises the couple not
to have children, suggesting that, in his mind, the reason incest is
wrong is because it runs a risk to any potential offspring.
For feminism, clearly, incest is wrong where it is an instance of
abuse, where it is non-consensual. However, that the nature and
not the quality of the relationship between the couple is the legal
issue was brought home in a different case reported in 1990 in
Scotland, where although the crime of incest is somewhat
differently defined from English law, the definition similarly
excludes the question of consent, defining certain relationships as
incest whether the intercourse is consenting or not:
A man who served a year for incest has had his conviction
quashed after genetic fingerprinting revealed that the girl
was not his daughter. The man was jailed in 1986 after
pleading guilty to an incestuous relationship with the girl,
whom he believed to be his daughter, while she was aged
16–19. After his release from jail, the man was charged
again with having unlawful sex with the girl. By that
time, genetic fingerprinting techniques had become available
viii
PREFACE
and tests revealed that there was no blood relationship
between them.
(The Scotsman, 8.10.1990)
By default (the tests had been conducted in order to identify
semen stains and not to establish paternity), the arrival of new
technologies in legal procedures enabled this man to challenge his
previous conviction for incest, even though no one involved denied
that intercourse had taken place and both he and the young woman
believed him to be her father.
In attempting to look at the feminist work on incestuous abuse
within the context of other ways of understanding the wrong of
incest, and with particular reference to how these understandings
impinge on law, this book considers how incest is ‘put into
discourse’ within the ‘power-knowledge-pleasure’ network that
Michel Foucault made his object of study. Initially I found
Foucault’s work intriguing because certain arguments seemed to
sit well with the feminist work, such as his explication of a
power that controls through the mechanism of a gaze or his
insistence that sexuality is constructed through discourse.
However, in some important senses Foucault’s thesis throws down
a gauntlet to feminists hoping to break the ‘conspiracy of silence’
around sexual abuse in order to emerge into a better, freer, more
understanding world. He implicitly casts the feminist work as
naive, slavishly reproducing models of understanding power and
freedom that fail to grasp the present operations of power around
sex, and thereby falling into the trap of producing more and
more talk on sex that, far from liberating us, ensnares us deeper
into the web. Thus the task became as much one of conducting
a debate between Foucault and feminism and an investigation
into the possibilities of Foucauldian feminism as it was an
investigation of the issue of incest.
In mounting such an investigation, I have had to run to keep
up with the publication of relevant texts, feeling at times, I imagined
in my more deluded moments, like Virginia Woolf in the British
Museum when faced with the enormity of her investigation into
women and fiction:
Here had I come with a notebook and a pencil proposing to
spend a morning reading, supposing that at the end of the
morning I should have transferred the truth to my
notebook…. ‘How shall I ever find the grains of truth
ix