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Sexuality & Culture (2017) 21:121141
DOI 10.1007/s12119-016-9386-6
ORIGINAL PAPER
Lydia Kokkola1 Elina Valovirta2
Published online: 21 October 2016 The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract This article compares the discourse of sibling incest evident in a corpus of ction with the discourse found in clinical, sociological and criminal literature. Whereas the former primarily regards the coupling as a bad romance, the latter presents the idea that it is unequivocally harmful. This discrepancy between the two discourses surrounding sexual relationships between brothers and sisters speaks to literary ctions need for thwarted romances for the purposes of the literary market. A more detailed look into three novels from the corpus, Tabitha Suzumas Forbidden (2010), Donna Tartts The Secret History (1992) and Pauline Melvilles The Ventriloquists Tale (1997) shows how this logic of sibling incest as a bad romance works in practice.
Keywords Sibling incest Twincest Romance Affect Fiction Shame
There are many countriesincluding Belgium, Portugal, Russia, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Ivory Coast, Brazil and Argentinawhere sexual relations between adult siblings are not criminalized, although marriage is not permitted. On one hand, what could be more ordinary than sibling relationships and love between siblings in the family? (Flannery 2007). 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. To mention just a few examples from the worlds of gossip media and pornography, we have Hugh Hefners former twin girlfriends,
& Lydia Kokkola [email protected]
Elina Valovirta elina.valovirta@utu.
1 English and Education, Lule University of Technology, 971 87 Lule, Sweden
2 Department of English, University of Turku, 20014 Turku, Finland
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12119-016-9386-6&domain=pdf
Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s12119-016-9386-6&domain=pdf
Web End = The Disgust that Fascinates: Sibling Incest as a Bad Romance
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Kristina and Karissa Shannon, the late Whitney Houstons daughter and adopted son who were rumored to marry, and the appearance of the Czech Peters twins in American gay porn.1 These examples use the couples fraternal relation to engender an abject response from the audience. Abjection describes the intertwining of disgust and fascination: the combinatory affect that leads people to stare at car crashes and train wrecks. This paper makes use of...