Everybody’s Family Romance

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Everybody’s Family Romance

Reading Incest in Neoliberal America

Gillian Harkins

Table of Contents

$25.00 paper
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5347-8

$75.00 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5348-5

Posits the late twentieth-century increase in incest literature against political and economic changes of the era

In the 1990s, a boom in autobiographical novels and memoirs about incest emerged, making incest one of the hottest topics to connect daytime TV talk shows, the self-help industry, and the literary publishing circuit. In Everybody’s Family Romance, Gillian Harkins places this proliferation of incest literature at the center of transformations in the political and economic climate of the late twentieth century.

Harkins’s interdisciplinary approach reveals how women’s narratives about incest were co-opted by—and yet retained resistant strains against—the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. Across chapters examining legal cases on recovered memory, popular journalism, and novels and memoirs by Dorothy Allison, Carolivia Herron, Kathryn Harrison, and Sapphire, Harkins demonstrates that incest narratives look backward into the past. In these accounts, images of incest forge links between U.S. chattel slavery and the distributive impasses of the welfare state and between decades-distant childhoods and emergent memories of the present.

In contrast to recent claims that incest narratives eclipse broader frameworks of political and economic power, Harkins argues that their emergence exposes changing structural relations between the family and the nation and, in doing so, transforms the analyses of American familial sexual violence.

Gillian Harkins is associate professor of English at the University of Washington.

336 pages | 3 b&w illustrations | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface: Nobody’s Home

Introduction: Everybody’s Family Romance

1. Laying Down the Law: The Modernization of American Incest

2. Legal Fantasies: Populist Trauma and the Theater of Memory

3. Seduction by Literature: Sexual Property and Testimonial Possession

4. Surviving the Family Romance? Realism and the Labor of Incest

5. Consensual Relations: The Scattered Generations of Kinship

Conclusion: Beyond the Incest Taboo

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Everybody’s Family Romance *Reading Incest in Neoliberal America* Gillian Harkins Table of Contents		$25.00 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5347-8 $75.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5348-5
Posits the late twentieth-century increase in incest literature against political and economic changes of the era In the 1990s, a boom in autobiographical novels and memoirs about incest emerged, making incest one of the hottest topics to connect daytime TV talk shows, the self-help industry, and the literary publishing circuit. In Everybody’s Family Romance, Gillian Harkins places this proliferation of incest literature at the center of transformations in the political and economic climate of the late twentieth century. Harkins’s interdisciplinary approach reveals how women’s narratives about incest were co-opted by—and yet retained resistant strains against—the cultural logics of the neoliberal state. Across chapters examining legal cases on recovered memory, popular journalism, and novels and memoirs by Dorothy Allison, Carolivia Herron, Kathryn Harrison, and Sapphire, Harkins demonstrates that incest narratives look backward into the past. In these accounts, images of incest forge links between U.S. chattel slavery and the distributive impasses of the welfare state and between decades-distant childhoods and emergent memories of the present. In contrast to recent claims that incest narratives eclipse broader frameworks of political and economic power, Harkins argues that their emergence exposes changing structural relations between the family and the nation and, in doing so, transforms the analyses of American familial sexual violence. Gillian Harkins is associate professor of English at the University of Washington. 336 pages \| 3 b&w illustrations \| 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 \| 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface: Nobody’s Home Introduction: Everybody’s Family Romance 1. Laying Down the Law: The Modernization of American Incest 2. Legal Fantasies: Populist Trauma and the Theater of Memory 3. Seduction by Literature: Sexual Property and Testimonial Possession 4. Surviving the Family Romance? Realism and the Labor of Incest 5. Consensual Relations: The Scattered Generations of Kinship Conclusion: Beyond the Incest Taboo Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index