Telling Incest

An exploration of how specific historical contexts, narrative conventions, and cultural politics shape the ways that stories of incest are told and heard

This book explores the intersections of sexualized, gendered, and racialized traumas in five US novels about father-daughter incest from the 1990s. It examines how incest can be connected to wider past and present structural oppression and institutional abuse, and what fiction looks like that testifies against and references a historical background of slavery, poverty, settler colonialism, annexation, and immigration. Investigating the means of resistance used against attempts at silencing and denial in these texts, the book also shows how contemporary women’s novels can propose social change. Overall, this study uniquely argues that the individual trauma of incest in these texts must be understood in relation to histories of and present collective wounding against marginalized communities. By sitting at the intersections between trauma theory and US third world feminism, it allows for theory to meet literary activism.

The first major study to challenge the narrow definition of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by rereading six American literary texts, this book argues for the importance of literature in representing not just circumscribed, singular traumatic events, as Cathy Caruth argued in the late nineties, but for giving voice to chronic and cumulative, or complex, traumatic experiences. This interdisciplinary study traces the development of father–daughter incest narratives published in the last hundred years, from male-authored fiction to female-authored memoir, bringing new readings to Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and the Dylan Farrow-Woody Allen case. This study builds on the work of those ushering in a second-wave of trauma theory, which has argued that the difficulty of speaking about a traumatic experience is not necessarily caused by neurobiological changes that prevent victims from recalling details. Rather, it’s from social and political repercussions. In other words, they argue that many who experience trauma aren’t unable to deliver accounts; they fear the results. There is a significant gender component to trauma, whose implications, along with those of race and class, have largely gone unexamined in the first-wave of trauma theory. Exploring two additional questions about articulating trauma, this book asks what happens when the voice of trauma is crying out from what Toni Morrison has called the “most delicate,” “most vulnerable” member of society: a female child; and, second, what happens when the trauma is not just a time-limit event but chronic and cumulative experiences. Some traumatic experiences, namely father–daughter incest, are culturally reduced to the untellable, and yet accounts of paternal incest are readily available in American literature. This book is written in part as a response to the psychological community which failed to include complex PTSD in the latest edition of the DSM (DSM-5), denying victims, many of whom are father–daughter incest survivors, the validation and recognition they deserve and leaving many misdiagnosed and thereby mistreated.

Many adopted or foster children have complex, troubling, often painful pasts. This book provides parents and professionals with sound advice on how to communicate effectively about difficult and sensitive topics, providing concrete strategies for helping adopted and foster children make sense of the past so they can enjoy a healthy, well-adjusted future. Approximately one of every four adopted children will have adjustment challenges related to their separation from the birth family, earlier trauma, attachment difficulties, and/or issues stemming from the adoption process. Common complicating issues of adopted children are feelings of rejection, abandonment, or confusion about their origins. While many foster and adoptive parents and even many professionals are reluctant to communicate openly about birth histories, silence only adds to the child's confusion and pain. This revised and significantly expanded edition of the award-winning Telling the Truth to Your Adopted or Foster Child equips parents with the knowledge and tools they need to communicate with their adopted or foster child about their past. Revisions include coverage of significant new research and information regarding the importance of understanding the child's trauma history to his or her well-being and successful adjustment in his foster or adoptive family. The authors answer such questions as: How do I share difficult information about my child's adoption in a sensitive manner? When is the right time to tell my child the whole truth? How do I obtain more information on my child's history? Detailed descriptions of actual cases help the parent or caregiver find ways to discover the truth (particularly in closed and international adoption cases), organize the information, and explain the details of the past gently to a toddler, child, or young adult who may find it frightening or confusing.

From the ages of nine to fourteen, Lucie Spear was sexually abused by her own father. Lucie shares her journey of recovery, clearly explaining the loss of self and family that results from an abuser breaking the most basic of trust between parent and child. She also manages to sympathetically convey the complex inter-family dynamics that emerge once incest is revealed. A New Legacy for Incest Survivors was written to be a moving and ultimately triumphant look into what it takes to survive incest and go on to build a life full of rich, loving relationships; while ensuring that Lucie’s own daughter and grand-daughters would live free from incest's shadow.

In Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England, Bruce Thomas Boehrer argues that a preoccupation with incest is built not the dominant social and cultural concerns of early modern England. Proceeding from a study of Henry III's divorce and succession legislation, through the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, this work examines the interrelation between family politics and literary expression in and around the English royal court.

Describes incest, its possible causes, its effects, and what can be done to stop it.

In the early 1980s incest was ceasing to be a taboo subject. In Britain there was much conjecture but little knowledge about it, although some estimates suggested that as many as one child in ten would experience some form of sexual abuse within the family. Originally published in 1982, Jean Renvoize had travelled around the USA, where considerable attention had been paid to incest in the previous few years, meeting professionals ranging through paediatricians, policemen, university researchers, social workers, lawyers, and – more important – victims and abusers themselves. This knowledge, added to the sparser British research, opened up a hitherto closed subject, bringing a wide range of controversial information to an audience composed of the general public as well as professionals involved in this field at the time. The author’s clear and easy style, which characterised her earlier books on related subjects – Children in Danger and Web of Violence – makes this a work of general as well as specialist interest.