We read this imposition of the familiar (the family, the romance plot) on the acts that are normally secretive (sex and romance between siblings) as a means by which to explore the formation of taboo. In its stickiness, sibling incest fascinates even as it disgusts.
Moreover, the frequency with which this trope appears indicates that sibling incest is what Sara Ahmed would term ‘sticky’: something which incites a heightened intensity of affect when coming into contact with others (Ahmed, 2004, p. The dominant narrative that emerges from fiction is not of abuse, victimhood and psychological damage, but rather that of thwarted, ‘bad’ romance. In short, we read the corpus of literature as a cultural expression of collective values. We contrast the narrative trajectory that dominates the fiction with empirical research within the domains of psychology, sociology and criminal law to suggest that the fiction presents a singularly limited stance that differs markedly on reports on real life accounts.Įrnestine Schlant describes “literature as the seismograph of a people’s moral positions… It reveals even where it is silent its blindspots and absences speak a language that is stripped of conscious agendas” (1999, p. In the fiction, readers are encouraged to align themselves with characters and oppose societal disapproval.
Our goal is to examine how this fiction encourages abject responses from readers, even as it presents the relationship as a loving romance. This paper makes use of a corpus of 29 novels originally written in English depicting sexual desire between siblings, several of whom are twins. Abjection describes the intertwining of disgust and fascination: the combinatory affect that leads people to stare at car crashes and train wrecks. Footnote 1 These examples use the couple’s fraternal relation to engender an abject response from the audience. To mention just a few examples from the worlds of gossip media and pornography, we have Hugh Hefner’s former twin girlfriends, Kristina and Karissa Shannon, the late Whitney Houston’s daughter and adopted son who were rumored to marry, and the appearance of the Czech Peters twins in American gay porn. On the other hand, in the English speaking world, sibling love in the form of incest is treated as a sensational, strange phenomenon, particularly in the tabloid media. On one hand, what could be more ordinary than sibling relationships and love between siblings in the family? (Flannery 2007). There are many countries-including Belgium, Portugal, Russia, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Ivory Coast, Brazil and Argentina-where sexual relations between adult siblings are not criminalized, although marriage is not permitted.
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