Lust is Relative: Accidental Incest’s Affective and Legal Resonances

Lara Karaian Institute of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Carleton University, Ottawa Canada

Submitted for consideration to Law, Culture and the Humanit i es- Dec. 23, 2015 Accepted for Publication June 8, 2016 (Please note: This is version 1 (pre-peer-review) of my submitted article. A revised, post-peer review version cannot be posted until 12 months after publication of the article in the journal)

Abstract:

What, if anything, is different about this contemporary moment with respect to the obstinacy of the incest taboo? Here, I examine the nature, meaning, affect and resonances of representations of “accidental incest” and “technology facilitated accidental incest” in popular culture, pornography, and PSAs. Drawing on affect theory, posthumanist theories of embodiment and sexuality, and Eve Sedgwick’s notion of a “reparative’ reading”, I consider how digital and reproductive technologies and their cultural representations potentially extend categories of sex, sexuality, and kinship relations and provide new affective opportunities for users and viewers to rethink our sexual relations and our contemporary sexual lawscapes. Key words: Accidental Incest, Digital Technology, Virtual Intimacy, Posthuman, Affect, Sexual Taboo

Introduction

It was an episode of The Mindy Project that inspired me to query, and to queer, accidental incest

(hereinafter ‘AI’).1 Amidst Mindy Lahiri’s sexual exploits as a thick, thirsty, husband-hungry, South Asian

OB/GYN, are those of her colleagues.2 In one particular episode, Mindy’s co-worker Peter sees a

headless “tit pic” on the cell phone of their mutual colleague, Danny. Danny is visibly and unusually

distraught by the fact that Peter has viewed the image and actively tries to prevent Peter from forwarding

the picture to his own phone. Having thwarted Peter’s efforts Danny then vehemently insists that Peter

not make a mental note of the anonymous “boobies” for his “[spank/crank] bank”, as Peter claims to

have already done. In an effort to taunt the obviously uncomfortable Danny, Peter closes his eyes and

moans with pleasure as he recalls the image. Cue the solo violin’s eerie score and the comedic reveal—

1 Accidental incest, for my purposes, refers to voluntary, erotic or sexual engagement between family members, broadly defined, who may be estranged (ex: parents and their children, who grew up apart but meet as adults; siblings who are conceived via new reproductive technologies who share a common sperm donor), and/or who are not initially aware of their shared familial genealogy. 2 Thick and thirsty, as they are used here, are contemporary terms for voluptuous and horny respectively.

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the breasts are actually those of Peter’s sister, Sally! Suddenly, Peter is dry heaving and frantically looking

for a place to vomit. “On no….oh no…,” he gasps, “I just saw my sister’s boobs! I WAS TURNED ON

BY MY SISTER’S BOOBS!”3

Figure 1: Peter, retching after realizing he was attracted to an anonymous image of his sister's breasts

I simultaneously chuckled and cringed when I first watched this scene. Having researched and

written about the regulation of adolescent sexting I was, originally, intrigued by what I considered to be

the mobilization of accidental incest to tacitly govern adults’ consensual digital sexual relations. However

my interest quickly shifted to an examination of the nature, meaning, and affect of what I’m calling

“technology facilitated accidental incest” (hereinafter ‘TFAI’)—the voluntary but unintentional

facilitation of cybersex with one’s kin, via the use of cell phones, digital apps, webcams, chat rooms,

instant messaging, DIY porn, tweets, hook-up apps, and sexts. Did Peter’s experience, I wondered, fall

within the “ill-defined horror” that is incest and its pervasive taboo?4 What, relationship, if any, exists

between cultural representations of AI, TFAI, and the ongoing criminalization of consensual adult incest

(hereinafter ‘CI’)?5

The word “incest” is inflammatory. It has traditionally denoted two quite different forms of

behaviour—non-consensual and consensual—however the latter is rarely the first typology that comes

to mind, in large part because most modern incest criminal convictions involve non-consensual physical

3 The Mindy Project, “Girl Crush”, Season 2, Episode 18 (2014). Interestingly, the decontextualized image of Peter retching can also be read as him climaxing. This serves as one (comedic) illustration of the polysemic meanings of incest considered herein. 4 John Seery, “Stumbling toward a Democratic Theory of Incest”, Political Theory, 41:1 (2013), 5-32. 5 For an analyses of the relationship between representations of crime and regulation of crime see Austin Sarat, ed. Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture (Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2011); Nicole Rafter and Michelle Brown, Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Keith Hayward, and Mike Presdee, eds. Framing Crime: Cultural Criminology and the Image (New York: Routledge, 2010).

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relations involving minors.6 Nonconsensual incest overlaps with acts of child sexual abuse, rape and

statutory rape that are coercive in that they usually involve a disparity in age, authority, and dependency

between two family members. Consensual incest, in its more normative guise, involves heterosexual

intercourse and/or marriage between adult persons who are known to be, either legitimately or

illegitimately, closely related to one another.7 Accidental incest blurs the consensual/nonconsensual

distinction to the extent that it describes a physical sexual relationship between family members that is

consensual until this consent is (purportedly) vitiated (culturally and/or legally) by the knowledge that

the object of one’s desires is actually their kin. TFAI potentially adds to this incest taxonomy to the

extent that the “threat” of incest is extended to “virtual” but nevertheless “real” sexual relations.

Consensual incest remains a crime in many countries and jurisdictions around the world

(including the US, UK and Germany). Often included in the category of “close relatives” are biological

parents, children, siblings, and half-siblings.8 Depending on the jurisdiction the category may also include

cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces. Laws prohibiting consensual incestuous marriages exist in all

fifty US states. While only a few states ban sex between first cousins, many include non-biological

relatives, such as step-parents and step-children and adoptive parents and adopted children. 9 In most US

states consent and context are largely irrelevant to a consensual incest prosecution. Adult siblings who

were raised apart and who did not meet and begin a consensual sexual relationship with one another

until after they both turned 18 could be, and indeed have been, prosecuted under incest laws alongside

relations that lack consent and involve large age and power differentials.10

6 Carolyn S. Bratt, “Incest Statutes and the Fundamental Right of Marriage: Is Oedipus Free To Marry?” Family Law Quarterly, 18(2) (1984), 257. Although somewhat outdated, out of ninety-six randomly selected criminal incest appellate decisions in which ages were revealed, ninety-four involved an adult defendant and a minor victim. 7 Vera Bergelson, “Vice is nice but Incest is Best: The Problem of a Moral Taboo”, Criminal Law and Philosophy, 7 (2013), 43-59. At pg. 44. 8 Tatjana Hörnle, “Consensual Adult Incest: A Sex Offence?”, New Criminal Law Review, 17: 1 (2014), 76-102. At pg. 77. 9 Vera Bergelson, “Vice is nice but Incest is Best: The Problem of a Moral Taboo”, Criminal Law and Philosophy, 7 (2013), 43-59. At pg. 44 10 See Bergelson “Vice is Nice” (2013) for a discussion of Allen and Pat Muth, 45 and 30 year siblings who were raised apart and met after they were of age. Convicted of incest in 1997 the couple was stripped of their parental rights and their four children were placed in adoption. See also Hörnle “Consensual Adult Incest” (2014) for a discussion of the Steubing case, adjudicated in Germany and the European Court of Human rights.

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The foundation upon which the legal regulation of consensual incest rests is multifaceted. More

typical and prominent rationales include: concerns about consanguineous relationships producing

children with disabilities; protection of children from sexual abuse at the hands of relatives; the

protection of “the family” more generally by preventing intra-familial sexual jealousies and conflict; the

prevention of immorality; conformity with religious commands; and the idea that incest prohibitions

developed because of the social advantages of forming ties outside the family.11 Additional, more tacit

but no less forceful explanations include maintaining dominance over “uncivilized Others”; xenophobic

attempts to protect the nation from “contaminating Others”; and the cultural logics of the neoliberal

state.12 Despite the fact that legal commentators have persuasively attacked these foundations as

inadequate justifications for prohibiting consensual incest, the taboo and consensual incest’s

criminalization persist.13

11 Anonymous, “Inbred Obscurity: Improving Incest Laws in the Shadow of the ‘Sexual Family’”, Harvard Law Review, 8 (2006), 2464-2485. At pg. 2462-2465. See also Bergelson “Vice is Nice” (2013), 45. 12 Gillian Harkins, Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2009). 13 See Martin Ottenheimer, Forbidden Relatives: The American Myth of Cousin Marriage (University of Illinois Press,1996); Courtney Meghan Cahill, “Same-sex Marriage, Slippery Slope Rhetoric, and the Politics of Disgust: A Critical Perspective on Contemporary Family Discourse and the Incest Taboo”, Northwestern University Law Review, 99 (2004), 1543-1612; Michael Cobb, “Uncivil Wrongs: Race, Religion, Hate and Incest in Queer Politics”, Social Text 23: 3-4 (2005), 251-274. Ummni Khan, “Kissing Cousins: Racism, Homophobia and Compulsory Able-bodiedness in the Controversy over Inter-Cousin Marriage”, Jindal Global Law Review, 4 (2013), 268–387; Diane B. Paul and Hamish G. Spencer, “‘It’s Ok, We’re Not Cousins by Blood’: The Cousin Marriage Controversy in Historical Perspective”, PLoS Biol, 6:12 (2008), 2628; By way of example Ottenheimer, (1996) notes that prohibitions against cousins’ marrying predate modern genetics by centuries and have rarely reflected biological concerns. In his book, which focuses strictly on cousin marriages, he writes that although many people believe that cousin marriages have historically been banned in the US because of potential birth defects, cousin marriages were banned to expedite the assimilation of new immigrants to the US. Indeed, arguments about the genetic risks posed by physical sexual relations between relations to their children have already failed to provide a solid case against consensual incest. Not only does this line of argument not account for the stigma attributed to incestuous sterile or same-sex couples, it also devalues the worth of people with physical or mental differences. According to the National Society of Genetic Counselors, the increased risk congenital difference is estimated to be 1.7%-2.8 % higher than the general population. Robin Bennett et al., “Genetic Counseling and Screening of Consanguineous Couples and their Offspring: Recommendations of the National Society of Genetic Counselors”, Journal of Genetic Counseling, 11: 2 (April 2002), 97-119. The Max Planck Institute reports that it is difficult to attribute the slight increases in the prevalence of diseases exclusively to genetic reasons in societies where relatives (such as first cousins) frequently marry in light of the impact of other, socioeconomic factors. As cited in Hörnle (2014), 96. Moreover, as Bergelson notes, In no other circumstances, does the law penalize people for producing defective [sic] offspring. We do not require people to be tested for genetic abnormalities as a condition of granting them a marriage license. We do not prohibit procreation by people known to possess a defective gene…As a rule, the partners with disabilities, and particularly the parents who give birth to a sick child, enjoy respect and sympathy of the members of their community whereas incestuous couples are despised, prosecuted and condemned. (2013), 47-48.

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Novelists’ and screenwriters’ long standing fascination with accidental and consensual incest is

well documented. This fascination continues to date, although digital and reproductive technology, as is

discussed below, more frequently occupy an honoured place in CI, AI and TFAI plot-lines. What then, if

anything, is different about this contemporary moment with respect to the obstinacy of the incest taboo?

How, if at all, do reproductive technologies, digital technologies and representations of CI, AI, and TFAI

intersected with one another, and to what end? In what ways, if at all, might these experiences and their

representations contributed to the destigmatization of consensual incest and to its potential

decriminalization?

I begin my analysis from the supposition that consensual adult incest is a valid possibility.14 I

suggest that representations of CI, AI and TFAI in popular culture and pornography, present alternative

and new affective opportunities for users and viewers to experience the “messy and capacious world of

public sexual encounters;” expand our emotional and erotic desires; and potentially destigmatize and

decriminalize consensual incestuous relations.15 I take as my starting point Michel Warner’s contention

in The Trouble with Normal, that people commonly do not know their desires until they find them.16 He

writes:

New fields of sexual autonomy come about through new technologies: soap, razors, the pill, condoms, diaphragms, Viagra, lubricants, implants, steroids, videotape, vibrators, nipple clamps, violet wands, hormones, sex assignment surgeries, and others we can’t yet predict… The psychic dimensions of sex change as people develop new repertoires of fantasy and new social relations, like “white” or “construction worker,” not to mention new styles of gender and shifting balances of power between men and women. Through long processes of change, some desires too stigmatized to be thought about gradually gain legitimacy, such as the desire for a homosexual lover. Others lose. Even desires now thought to be natural and normative, such as equal romantic love, only

14 Hörnle, “Consensual Adult Incest”, 84. I adopt Hörnle’s distinction between factual and valid consensual incest. Hörnle describes instances of consensual incest that are not valid as those between a parent and a much younger child, or a much older sibling and child, that continue into adulthood. These are not the instance of consensual incest that I am addressing in this paper. Whereas factual consensual incest somewhat superficially relies on a claim of “no objections,” valid consensual incest—the elements of which remain under debate—generally involves attention to “the consent giver’s general personal competence and situational factors such as coercion, deception, errors, or intoxication.” 15 Shaka McGlotten, Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect and Queer Sociality, (New York, SUNY Press, 2013), 6. Much like McGlotten’s work technologies themselves are not my focus. Rather, my interest is in “the kinds of discourses in which technologies are situated… the contacts they afford” (14) and the affects and effects they engender. 16 Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life (Harvard University Press, 2000), 10-11.

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came into being relatively late in human history; they depend just as much on politics and cultural change as do the stigmatized ones.17

Drawing on feminist, queer and cultural posthumanist theories of embodiment, subjectivity and sexuality

in an information age18, as well as Eve Sedgwick’s notion of a “reparative’ reading”—wherein affect is

not disavowed in the rush to make meaning, and claims to ownership over “truth” are viewed as

foreclosing a different future19—I consider how different digital and reproductive technologies intersect

with bodies and sexualities in ways that extend and queer categories of sex, sexuality, and kinship

relations. These experiences, their representations, and their affects, I suggest, offer us an opportunity to

rethink our sexual relations and our contemporary sexual lawscapes, including normative conceptions of

sexual and kinship relations, as well as the xenophobic and ableist relations upon which they rest.20

Part I of this article sets the scene by briefly describing recent representations of consensual

incest, accidental incest, and technology facilitated accidental incest in mainstream popular culture,

pornography, and public service announcements. In Part II I employ cultural, queer and feminist

posthumanisms as well as affect theory to consider the embodied experiences of CI, AI and TFAI, and

their cultural representations. Adopting the position that the body is virtual and the virtual is somatic,21 I

query cybersex’s status as “real” sex—by virtue of its excess of affects, intensities, sensual movements,

emotional residues, despite an absence of normative notions of touch, proximity, penetration and

reproduction. I explore how these theorization of the boundaries, nature, meaning and affects of the

17 Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 10-11. 18 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York, Routledge, 1991), 149-181; Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingstone eds., Posthuman Bodies (Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1995); Deborah Lupton, “The Embodied computer/user”, Body and Society, 1:34 (1995), 97-112; David Bell, An Introduction to Cyber Cultures (New York, Routledge, 2001); Brain Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, Duke University Press, 2002); N. Katherine Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999); Anyd Miah, “A Critical History of Posthumanism”, MedicalEnhancementandPosthumanity, B.GordijnandR.Chadwickeds.(2008) 71-94. As Miah writes, posthumanism “is not a distinctive perspective. It is the detritus of perspectives.” 92. 19 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading And Reparative Reading; Or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You”, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. (Durham, Duke University Press, 2003), 123-152. See also Heather Love, “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”, Criticism, 52:2 (2010), 235-241. 20 For a consideration of “lawscapes” see Andrea Philippopoulous-Mihalopoulos, “Atmospheres of Law: Senses, Affects, Lawscapes”, Emotion, Space and Society 7 (2012), 35-44. 21 See Hayles, How we Became Posthuman (1999) for a consideration of how text is embodied.

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virtual body and cybersex queer sexual and familial relations and in doing so potentially reshape

questions of sexual taboo. In Part III I bring these sections together and offer a reparative reading of

these experiences and their representations. Returning to Warner’s contention that “the psychic

dimensions of sex change as people develop new repertoires of fantasy and new social relations” I

examine the ways in which these experiences and representations—facilitated as they are by reproductive

or digital technology—destabilize the fantasy/reality binary in ways that potentially reconfigures the

experience of consensual sex between adult kin as not an outright “yuck”, but instead as a forceful

“maybe”. Even this small shift, I posit, has implications for the regulation of consensual incest and the

moralistic, ableist and xenophobic foundations upon which this politico-legal regulation rests.22

Part I: CI, AI and TFAI in Popular Culture, Porn, and PSA’s

Examples of contemporary television shows depicting factual, if not valid, consensual incest plot

lines include, but are far from limited to: True Detective; Top of the Lake; Game of Thrones; Arrested

Development; Bored to Death; Boardwalk Empire; Dexter; Lost; and, Brothers and Sisters.23 The nature of the

relationships in these examples involves some combination of siblings, step-sibling, adopted-sibling,

parent-adult child, parent-adult stepchild, and cousins. They cut across genres such as horror, drama,

comedies and crime procedurals. This seeming ubiquity has prompted entertainment writers to ask:

“Why is incest all over prime time?”24 and “Has pop culture changed our perception of incest?”25 While

many of the CI plotlines involve characters that are represented as self/destructive they are also tender,

22 I use cyber sex and netsex interchangeably. 23 Lost (2004-2010): In a flashback, it is revealed that step-siblings, Boon and Shannon, were once romantically involved. Both characters are eventually killed off; Nip/Tuck (2003-2010): At the end of season 3, Quinton Costa, a bisexual man born without a penis, is revealed to be a serial killer. His rare physical deformity is attributed to the fact that his parents were related. Quinton is also sexually involved with his homicidal and bisexual sister, Kit McGraw; True Detective (2014 – ): The main antagonist of season 1 is revealed to be Eroll Childress, a serial killer who is both a paedophile and sexually involved with his unnamed, mentally disabled half-sister. Eroll is killed in the season finale; Arrested Development (2003-2013): As children and adolescents, first-cousins George Michael Bluth and Maeby Funke struggle to conceal their crushes on one another. Although the narrator ambiguously notes that the two eventually get to “second base”, it is eventually revealed that the two are not actually related by blood; Dexter (2006-2013): In season 6, Debra Morgan begins to come to terms with the fact that she is in love with her step-brother, Dexter. The love is unrequited and Debra is killed in the series finale 24 Tracy Clark-Flory, “Why is Incest all over Prime time?” Salon.com (Dec. 19, 2011) http://www.salon.com/2011/12/20/why_is_incest_all_over_prime_time/ 25 Ada Wong, “Has Pop Culture Changed out Perception of Incest?” Toronto Film Scene, (no date) http://thetfs.ca/article/has-pop-culture-changed-our-perception-of-incest/.

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erotic, and loving, prompting additional entertainment news headlines such as: “[Twelve examples of]

(consensual!) incestuous relationships that didn’t make our stomachs turn”26 and “13 Incestuous Pop-

Culture Couples With Cringe-Worthy Chemistry.”27

The allure of consensual incest is not limited to the creative minds of scriptwriters seeking new

ways to titillate and maintain a wider audience base. Fans of the show Supernatural have created digitally

manipulated images of its two male leads, the Wincester brothers, in bed together (aka “Wincest”)28, and

fan-fiction stemming from the popular children’s film Frozen (2013) casts the two sisters, Elsa and Anna,

as lovers (aka “Elsanna”)29. Both examples can be described as satellites of their cousin category

“twincest”—a term that is used to refer to the fraternal twin brother-sister relationship in Game of

Thrones, is referenced in the 2014 film Gone Girl, and which identifies a popular genre of pornography.

The prevalence of plot lines involving accidental incest is also notable. Indeed, Sofia Bull’s

forthcoming analysis of crime procedurals produced in the early 2000s points to numerous episodes

concerned with the causes and effects of accidental incest, such as: CSI; CSI Miami; Law and Order

Criminal Intent; Law and Order Special Victims Unit; NCIS, Numb3rs, and Perception.30 In all of these shows,

she writes, the investigators typically stumble upon a case of accidental incest while investigating another

crime – usually a murder – which has either been committed to break-up the incestuous couple or to

keep the relationship a secret.31 “In short,” Bull writes, “the taboo nature of incest – and particularly, the

26 Amelia McDonell-Parry, “12 Examples Of Not-Totally-Repulsive Incestuous Relationships In Pop Culture”, The Frisky, (12 Dec. 2012), http://www.thefrisky.com/photos/12-examples-of-not-totally-repulsive-incestuous-relationships-in-pop-culture/dexter_incest/ 27 L. Duca, and C. Rudolph, “13 Incestuous Pop-Culture Couples With Cringe-Worthy Chemistry”, Huffington Post, (2014, January 8), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/08/flowers-in-the-attic-lifetime_n_ 4533021.htm 28 Jace Lacob, “‘Boardwalk Empire,’ ‘Game of Thrones,’ and Others Break the Incest Taboo on TV”, The Daily Beast (2011, December 9), http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/10/boardwalk-empire-game-of-thrones-and-others-break-the-incest-taboo-on-tv.html 29 FanFiction: Unleash Your Imagination, https://www.fanfiction.net/community/ELSANNA/111651/ 30 Sofa Bull, New Genetics on Popular Television: The Rise of Test Tube TV (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, Forthcoming). A procedural drama is a genre of television programming which focuses on how crimes are solved or some other aspect of a law enforcement agency, legislative body, or court of law 31 Bull, Forthcoming

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possibility that the relationship might result in an inbred child – is depicted as a motivation for murder

even when the relationship as such is completely voluntary and harmonious.”32

While consensual and accidental incest are depicted in fictional television shows as some

combination of erotic, comical, sad, doomed, if not all out destructive, the pornography industry has

adopted a divergent approach.33 Twins have been present in gay pornography since the 1970s.34 More

recently the Visconti Triplets, advertised as “the first and only triplets in gay porn”, have appeared in a

variety of incest themed videos.35 Unlike most incest-based porn websites with actors who merely

pretend to be related, the Triplets do not physically touch each other. Instead, they either masturbate

together or simultaneously gratify the same individual(s). Elijah and Milo Peters, on the other hand, are

two, now 24 year old, Czech identical twins who, according to one commentator, “French kiss…

perform oral sex on each other… have anal sex; and most shockingly of all, they do it in a tender and

romantic way.”36

Two additional representations of technology facilitated accidental incest are also deserving of

mention here. The first is that of an anti-sexting child protection campaign produced by the Danish

group “My child online foundation”.37 In it, we see two white older teens, a boy and a girl, who are

seated at their remote and respective computers, engaging in a webcam facilitated “chat” with one

another. The viewer is provided with the perspective of the male teen who has typed something (in

Danish) into his chatbox. He then leans in to his monitor where we see a split screen; at the top right is a

video feed of a headless female wearing a red t-shirt with a skull and bones on it, directly below it is a

live feed of the headless torso of the boy whose perspective we are privy to. We then see the girl begin

to remove her shirt, which prompts the boy to stand up and take off his pants but not his boxers. The

32 Bull, Forthcoming. 33 Thomas Rogers, “Gay Porn’s Most Shocking Taboo” Salon.com (May 21, 2010) http://www.salon.com/2010/05/21/twincest/Rogers, 2010. 34 Rogers, 2010 35 http://www.viscontitriplets.com/ 36 Rogers, 2010 37 My Child Online Foundation, “Internetseks, daar kun je goed ziek van zijn!” (2006), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjMpVVDS0d0

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viewer is invited to infer from his actions that the male teen intends to show his penis to the girl via his

web cam and/or masturbate for/to/with her. At this point all that we can see of the girl is her white

naked torso and her hands covering her naked breasts. Off screen the boy’s mother calls him downstairs

for a meal and he quickly pulls up his pants and shuts off the computer. He hurries down the stairs and

is scarfing back a bowl of spaghetti before a blonde teenage girl wearing a red t-shit with a skull on it

takes a seat at the opposite side of the table. We then witness the two recognize each other’s respective

shirts as those of the individuals they were instant messaging with online. The boy remains hunched over

his bowl, seemingly frozen by the realization that the girl in the web cam is actually his sister. The girl,

revealing little emotion on her rather stoic face, slaps down the newspaper she has just picked up and

slumps back in her chair, crossing one arm protectively across her lower stomach and lap, presumably to

settle her upset stomach and/or possibly as a way of covering herself to counter her newfound sense of

exposure. The viewer is then provided with the campaign’s tagline, again in Dutch, which translates

loosely to: Internet sex: It can make you really ill!38—referring, presumably, to the disgust experienced

by the shocked siblings in this PSA as well as by its viewing audience.

Figure 2: Screen shots of Dutch PSA

Finally, take for example the recently developed smartphone Islendiga-App — the “App of

Icelanders” and its built-in “incest prevention alarm.” This app makes data from the Book of

Icelanders—a database developed in 1997 by deCODE and software entrepreneur Fridrik Skulason, and

which compiles information on 95 per cent of all Icelanders who have lived in the last 300 years—easily

38 My Child Online Foundation, “Internetseks, daar kun je goed ziek van zijn!” (2006), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjMpVVDS0d0

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accessible. This app contains within it the spectre of accidental incest in that it allows its users to bump

phones to see how closely related they are to one another in an attempt to prevent AI. While the app

developers adopted the slogan “Bump the app before you bump in bed,” they admit that the “idea that it

will be used by young people to make sure they don’t marry their cousins is of much more interest to the

press than a reflection of reality.”39

Given that accidental and consensual incest has long occupied the imaginations of literary

masters and artists, the remaining sections consider what, if anything, is different about the above noted

representations of CI, AI and TFAI in our contemporary moment. With the foundations of consensual

incest’s criminalization being actively challenged by legal scholarship, if not case law, at least not

successfully by case law, I examine the opportunities that the experiences and representations of CI, AI

and TFAI described above may present for a further disruption of the CI taboo and its legal regulation.

Part II: TFAI: Cybersex as “Real Sex” and the Shifting Scope of Sexual Taboos?

Feminists, post-structuralists, queer theorists, critical race scholars and phenomenologists, among

others, have long theorized the body—its borders, matter, meanings, affects, and relations.40 Lines of

inquiry about dis/embodiment have been expanded and extended by cultural studies, science and

technology studies, and communication theorists interested in bodies’ relations to culture, technology

and to cyberspace.41 Cultural and philosophical posthumanists, in particular, have theorized embodiment

and the liberal humanist subject in an information age;42 cultural manifestations of moral perspectives on

technology’s relationship to the body;43 and technology’s extension of bodies’ boundaries and embodied

39 CBC News, “Kissing Cousins? Icelandic app warns if your date is a relative: Risk of dating relatives an embarrassing problem in tiny country” (18 Apr. 2013) http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/kissing-cousins-icelandic-app-warns-if-your-date-is-a-relative-1.1390256 40 See Jasbir Puar’s investigation of “the liminality of body matter” with respect to intersectional subjectivity. Jabir Puar, “‘I Would Rather be a Cyborg than a Goddess: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory”, Philosophia, (2011), 49-66. Queer and critical gender posthumanists, such as Halberstam and Livingstone’s perspectives on the body, challenge “the coherence of the human body” and the idea of a human essence or common forms of human dignity. See Miah, (2008), 76. 41 Bell, 2001; Hayles, 1999; Massumi 2002, 42 Hayles, 1999; Haraway 1991; Lupton 1995 43 Miah, 2008, 76.

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awareness, among other issues.44 Combined, these works blur binaries of human/machine,

nature/culture, mind/body, public/private, physical/not-physical, real/virtual, and thus trouble the

social and political entitlements that flow from liberal humanist ways of organizing and knowing the

world.45

According to queer theorists Halberstam and Livingstone, posthuman bodies “are the causes and

effects of postmodern relations of power and pleasure, virtuality and reality, sex and its consequences.”46

“Technologies that remake the body” they write, “also permeate and mediate our relation to the ‘real’:

the real is literally unimaginable or only imaginable within a technological society: technology makes the

body queer, fragments it, frames it, cuts it, transforms desire...”47 Within this line of thinking the virtual

and the real collapse into one another and in doing so generate other realms of existing real things and

different layers of reality.48 Brian Massumi’s work in Parables of the Virtual : Movement, Affect, Sensation

extends this line of thought by querying affect, perception, cognition, causality, and time in relation to

technology and the sentient body.49 In one example he recalls a scientific experiment whereby patients

who had been implanted with cortical electrodes only felt electrical pulses on their skin if the stimulation

lasted for more than a half second. He postulates that the minimally perceivable, half-second lag between

the beginning of a bodily event and its completion in an outwardly directed active expression is not

missed because it is empty, but rather because it is overfull.50 “[D]uring the mysterious half second, what

we think of as “free”, “higher” functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed by

autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness, and between brain and

44 Massumi, 2002; Hales 1999; Halberstam and Livingstone, 1995; Bell, 2001: 143. Posthumanism—inscribed as it is with multiple meanings and expectations—investigates, in part, what it means to be both human and a liberal humanist subject (Miah, 2008, 75). Miah goes on to suggest that posthumanism “is not a distinctive perspective. It is the detritus of perspectives.” 92. 45 Miah, 2008: 78. However, as Miah writes, “histories of posthumanism consist in an going undecidability over the value of transgressing boundaries, in some cases as they relate to biological change.” 88. 46 Halberstam and Livingstone, 1995, 3 47 Halberstam and Livingstone, 1995, 16. 48 Massumi, 2002. Annette N. Markham has described the ‘reality’ of this ‘virtual’ environment as: “real becomes a double negative; simply put, when experiences are experienced, they cannot be ‘not real’’’. Annette N. Markham, Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space (Walnut Creek, CA, AltaMira Press, 1998). 49 Massumi, 2002, 28-29 50 Massumi, 2002, 28

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finger but prior to action and expression.”51 This, he suggests, requires a reworking of how we think

about the body.52 “Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is

as immediately virtual as it is actual.” 53 Just as we think about the body as virtual, so too can we think of

the virtual, as somatic.54 The cybernetic body, understood as an informational pattern, is never wholly

disembodied.55

This theorization of the liminal and virtual body has implication for our understanding of the

boundaries, nature, meaning and affects of cybersex and virtual intimacies.56 For the purposes of this

article cybersex is understood as one manifestation of virtual intimacy. While virtual intimacy is not

necessary for cybersex to occur it is also not necessarily absent by virtue of the on-line context. Indeed

McGlotten challenges the contention virtual intimacies are “failures before the fact” or not “the real

thing.” 57 In answer to the question “what is real intimacy?” McGlotten posits, as previously noted, that

the virtual is not opposed to the real and moreover, “intimacy is already virtual in the ways it is made

manifest through affective experience.”58 If the virtual is real and productive of new realities and real

intimacies, cybersex—punctured as it is by corporeality—can also be understood as real sex involving

new sets of relations. But this first begs the question, “what is real sex?” Historically, the answer to this

has been heterosexual and reproductive physical intercourse. Again queer posthumanism is instrumental

here. As Halberstam and Livingstone note, heterosexual biological reproduction “is merely one possible

function of one possible kind of fucking, as well as merely one of the many kinds of reproduction

required to perpetuate the code of the human.” As such, they suggest that, “there is a curious lack of

specificity in the term ‘fucking,’ a lack of coherence among its connotations, its variable associations with 51 Massumi, 2002, 29 52 Massumi, 2002, 30 53 Massumi, 2002, 31 54 See Hayles, How we Became Posthuman, 1999 for early discussion of posthumanist theory of embodied virtuality whereby information and text is embodied. According to Massumi, affect is an unformed, unstructured and subjectless virtual practice (2002, 260 note 3). According to Sianne Ngai, emotions, or feelings, are affect’s formed, narratively structured, individually subjectified meaning and function. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2005, 25). 55 Hayles, How we became posthuman, 1999 56 McGlotten, 2013 57 McGlotten, 2013, 2 58 McGlotten, 2013, 8

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pleasures and pains, with reproduction, with specific penetrations or frottages, with rhythmic frictions.

What is allowed to be fucking?”59 By way of an answer they suggest that the coupling of fucking and

reproduction has never been able to:

direct the traffics among power, pleasure, and bodies—traffics which include but are by no means exhausted by female ejaculation, sex-without-orgasm, orgasm-without-sex, sex- without-ejaculation, ejaculation-without-orgasm, reproduction-without-sex, sex-without-fucking, …It becomes possible to assert a non-relation between fucking and reproduction the relation upon which patriarchal humanity is predicated—because of the diversity of sexual practices, partly because of technological options, but mainly because the point where they converge is no longer an adequate anchoring point for a meaningful or workable system.60 So, within modern Western culture where sex is not reduced to fucking and fucking is not reduced to

reproduction, the boundaries between ‘sex,’ ‘sexuality,’ and intimacy are blurred. Sex can therefore be

understood to include an “array of acts, expectations, narratives, pleasures, identity-formations, and

knowledges.”61 This description, however, departs from Foucault’s contention that sex and sexuality

have “distinct meanings, with sex representing the physical act that is a ‘family matter’ and sexuality

representing individual desire and fantasies,”62 As Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality “sex is the

most speculative, more ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power

in its grip on bodies and materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures.63 So, while sex

cannot be conceived of outside of the field of sexuality the two are nevertheless viewed as somewhat

distinct. Power precedes sexuality and sexuality precedes sex. But such a distinction becomes somewhat

less helpful, according to Chris Ashford, when ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ lives collide in cyberspace.64 She writes,

“Cyberspace may be seen as more of a forum for sexuality than sex; yet this Foucauldian dichotomy too

is queered by cyberspace, with new fluid conceptions of ‘family’ brought forward and the personal

59 Halberstam and Livingstone, 1995, 12 60 Halberstam and Livingstone, 1995, 12 61 As cited in Chris Ashford, “Queer theory, cyber-ethnographies and researching online sex environments”, Information and Communications Technology Law, 18:3 (2009), 297–314. 62 Ashford, 2009, 302-303. Citing G. Danaher, T. Schirato, and J. Webb, Understanding Foucault (London, Sage, 2006), 135. 63 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Vintage, Reissue edition, 1978/1990), 155. 64 Ashford, 2009, 303.

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individual desire becoming a family desire for however momentary a period.”65

When making claims about cyberspace and cybersex’s affective residues and its queering of

sexual and kinship relations—Ashford is referring to cyberspace and cybersex as productive of non-

traditional family/phamily or relational structures including: chosen families, adopted families, blended

families and families created with the aid of new reproductive technologies.66 She is not, I believe,

speaking to how cyberspace and cybersex affects a re-imagining of consensual incestuous relations as

queer relations. This may be, in part, because the very same queer sexual and familial relations that she is

speaking to are often cited by the religious right, and are reified by gay and lesbian activists’, in their

discussions about whether gay and lesbian sex serves as the start of the slippery slope to non/consensual

incest and thus to moral decay and social degeneracy.67 As Cahill notes, same-sex relationships and incest

both represent a ‘departure’ from the symbolic norm—namely, “a deviation from the prototypical way in

which sexual identity is created, and maintained, in the family.”68 Those who opposed same-sex relations

thus use the incest taboo as a means of positing a slippery slope from the former to the latter. Their

discursive proximity is used to incite disgust towards the other.69 However, this same effect stems from

gay and lesbian activists’ explicit denial that such a slide will occur70, thus implicitly validating the much

maligned slide theory and reifying the incest taboo’s “persistent place of ‘honor’ at the bottom of the

slippery slope.”71

In the midst of these changes and the challenges they pose, perceptions of the realness of

cybersex have reshaped questions of sexual taboo. Whereas Ashford wonders whether viewing our

virtual selves as less real in some way allows us to consider virtual deviant behavior—namely infidelity

65 Ashford, 2009, 302-303. Emphasis mine. 66 Ashford, 2009, 301. 67 See Cahill, “Same-sex Marriage, Slippery Slope Rhetoric”, 2004; Cobb, “Uncivil Wrongs”, 2005; Khan, “Kissing Cousins”, 2013. 68 Cahill, 2004, 1602. 69 For a discussion of proximity’s relation to meaning making see Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York, Routledge, 2004). 70 Brett H. Mcdonnell, “Privacy Rights In A Post Lawrence World: Responses To Lawrence V. Texas: Is Incest Next?”, Cardozo Women’s Law Journal, 10:2 (2004), 337-365. 71 Cahill, 2004, 1549

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on-line—to be less of a taboo,72 psychologists such as Shirley Glass have argued that infidelity—any

emotional or sexual intimacy that violates trust—can constitute one of the greatest betrayals even if it

does not involve physical contact.73 At the same time, the mainstreaming and corporatization of

infidelity, as is captured by the adulterous dating site Ashley Madison.com, raises questions about the

taboo status of cheating in a context wherein polyamoury and non-monogamy are increasingly being

challenged, if not yet normalized.74 So, if we view our virtual selves to be equally real to our offline selves,

as posthumanists have posited, is virtual ‘deviant’ behaviour equally taboo to off-line sexual deviance, or

have our relations and techno-cultural context shifted such that the sexual taboo of CI, AI and TFAI has

tempered? In this last section I query CI, AI and TFAI’s affects, movements, intensities and residues and

consider what they contribute to cultural, feminist and queer posthumanists’ reconfigurations of our

perceptions of our bodily boundaries, sexual and kinship relations and their legal violations.

Part III: Reparative Readings and Expanded Repertoires of Fantasy/Reality

In this final section I offer a reparative reading of representations of CI, AI and TFAI in popular

culture and pornography. I consider the role played by technology and mainstream culture and

pornography in reconfiguring our perceptions of our bodily boundaries, sexual and kinship relations,

thus facilitating the potential demise of the consensual incest taboo and CI’s criminalization. It is not my

intention to: advance a claim that decriminalization equals sexual liberation; to offer a deterministic or

hypodermic thesis about media effects; or, to counter the dominant “disgusting-therefore-bad” narrative

with an oppositional yet potentially equally simplistic “desirous-therefore-good” one. Rather, as Albury

and others have claimed with respect to pornography, I suggest that these technology facilitated

experiences and popular story lines present us with an ethical and productive opportunity to consider the

ways that flawed, imperfect and ambivalent interactions and cultural texts offer us “a space to rethink the

72 Ashford, 2009, 307 73 Shirley Glass, “Shattered Vows: Getting Beyond Betrayal”, Psychology Today, (1998), 34. http://www.shirleyglass.com/psychology today.htm. See 74 See Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic (New York: Vintage, 2004).

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contemporary sexual landscape.”75 Drawing on Eve Sedgewick’s notion of “reparative reading” and its

mobilization by Kath Albury in her article Reading Porn Reparatively,76 I contend that representations of CI,

AI and TFAI provide a form of sexual storytelling that may serve as an important part of many people’s

self-recognition as sexual subjects and of their sexual relations as both legitimate and legal. These

popular representations, like those within the realm of pornography—including pornographic

representations of consensual incest—represent a diversity of sexual experiences and identities. They

also give rise to ambivalences, intensities and affective residues that can affect sexual and legal change. In

addition, and by way of a return to Warner’s contention that “the psychic dimensions of sex change as

people develop new repertoires of fantasy and new social relations” I examine the ways in which

twincest within internet pornography destabilizes the fantasy/reality binary and in doing so extends new

erotic relations.

Lust, love, sadness, hilarity, doom, destruction in some combination factor into and result from

most of the above noted experiences of CI, AI, TFAI and their popular representations. To evaluate

these representations in exclusively moral terms – as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ representations– “forecloses

their potential as tools for teaching and learning about changing sexual practices and sexual

subjectivities.” 77 Speaking to debates regarding pornography, Albury argues that the plethora of

pornographic texts—websites, magazines, self-help manuals and videos and DVDs—are reflections of

cultural currents that include both radical and regressive understandings of sex and gender. They also

serve as examples of possible sexual stories that can be tried on for size.” She goes on to claim:

Increasingly, too, they [pornographic texts] are sites that can be contested and challenged by the audiences who seek to produce, rather than just consume, sexually explicit media...[R]ather than condemning porn in moral terms for teaching ‘the wrong things’, I believe it is worth applying ethical thinking to the question of why porn is so appealing; and considering reparative answers to the question of what porn teaches, and what audiences learn from it. 75 Kath Albury, “Reading Porn Reparatively” Sexualities, 12:5 (2009), 649. Here Albury draws on the work of Eve K. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 2003. For a discussion about pornography as a serious object of analysis and meaning making see generally Linda Williams ed. Porn Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 76 Albury, “Reading Porn Reparatively”, 2009, 649. 77 Albury, “Reading Porn Reparatively”, 2009.

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The examples of AI mapped and analyzed by Bull offer their audience a range of learning

opportunities. As Bull argues, the fact that AI plot lines emerged on network television with such

prominence in the early 2000s can be understood as capitalizing on a moment when developments in

DNA technology and biomedicine sought to “affirm traditional Darwinist ideas about biological kinship

as significant, substantial and enduring.”78 At the same time, however, they also simultaneously called for

“a radical redefinition of kinship by providing new means for human intervention into the reproduction

process.”79 Ultimately, Bull suggests that despite acknowledging that a process of redefinition is in

progress, “the crime procedurals primarily articulate a traditional and essentialist perspective on

biological kinship, which is in line with their decidedly conservative and critical portrayal of new assisted

reproduction technologies and various types of ‘chosen families’.”80 Indeed, while some of these

plotlines explore the intricacies of incestuous feelings and relations, most mobilize the trope of

accidental incest to problematize and police voluntary sexual acts that are deemed biologically

“unnatural” and reproductive practices and family structures that are deemed socially “unsuitable.” As

such, they are regularly “solved” with either the death of a character or the death of their romanitic

sentiments. At their worst the procedurals deliver the explicit take-away message that accidental, or

accidental-turned-consensual incestuous lust/love is shortsighted, immoral, harmful and that its

practioners are uncivilized, dangerous, killers, thus fostering normative claims about CI and AI’s

“wrongness”.

While these procedurals undoubtedly traffic in repronormativity and heternormativity as well as

classism and xenophobia, their meanings are unstable and not closed.81 The very digital and technological

context that fuels their narrative arcs transforms the context within which they are experienced and

78 Bull, Forthcoming, 6. 79 Bull, Fortchoming, 6. 80 Bull, Fortchoming, 6. 81 To the extent that some of the consensual incest narratives traffic in classist and racialized representations of “white trash”; poor and inbred Southerners; or, brown, foreign, cousin lovers. For an examination of the polysemic meaning of representation see Stuart Hall, “Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices”, Stuart Hall ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Thousand Oaks: CA, Sage (in association with The Open University), 1997).

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interpreted. For instance, the celebration of genetic purity within many of the AI and CI narratives, as

well as the implied slippery slope to off-line consensual sex with kin threatened by some of the texts

described above, may increasingly hold less persuasive sway in our contemporary context. As Bull notes,

cases of accidental incest are usually depicted as voluntary relationships without any elements of coercion

and sexual violence; they are almost solely problematized on the basis of genetics. Increasingly, however,

the power and persuasion of “genetic risk” arguments are being challenged in ways that diminish the

condemnatory reading of these texts.82 For instance the ableist foundations upon which these threats

largely rest have been actively challenged by critical disability studies and disability rights movements.83

The reality of increasingly more and more children being conceived via reproductive technologies, the

growing body of work debunking the greater probabilities of genetic risks in instances of consensual

incest—including the body of work analogizing these risks to other, non-criminalized reproductive

“risky” practices such as the increasing number of women over 35 who are conceiving and giving

birth—raise questions about the ontology of accidental and consensual incest in our current cultural and

technological context.

In this contemporary context a reparative reading of representations of CI, AI and TFAI present

opportunities to forge new meanings and new erotic relations. Even if we can posit with some certainty

that representations of CI and AI remain predominantly ableist, hetero- and repro-normative, as well as

tacitly classist and racist, as Albury asks, “‘So what? What does this reading….tell us that we don’t

already know? What does it offer those who strive for social change, other than the grudging consolation

of ressentiment?”84 In the spirit of offering a reading that serves a purpose other than that of a

prescriptive tools of domination I shift now to a consideration of what these representations may reveal

82 It bears repeating that while genetics is only one of the foundations upon which the taboo rests it is often the quintessential reason provided for regulating these relations. 83 See Dan Goodley, Dis/Ability Studies: Theorising Disablism and Ableism (New York: Routledge 2014); Beth Ribet, “Emergent disability and the limits of equality: a critical reading of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities”, Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, 14 (Annual 2011), 155; Rabia Belt, “‘And then comes life’: The Intersection of Race, Poverty, and Disability in the HBO’s The Wire”, Rutgers Race and the Law Review, 13:2 (2012), 1-29. 84 Albury, “Reading Porn Reparatively” 2009, 650.

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about “changing sexual practices and subjectivities.”85

A reparative read of some of the representations mapped earlier on in this article might go

something like this: Within popular culture, consensual incest’s status as consensual is vitiated by natural

law/social pressure/legal rule whereas accidental incest—tech facilitated or otherwise—is consensual

until the parties’ consent is (presumably) vitiated by the knowledge that the object of one’s desire is, in

fact, their kin. These CI, AI and TFAI storylines are rarely ‘all bad’ nor ‘all good’ but rather are often

ambivalent. They are also productive of myriad political and affective resonances. They leave in their

wake a form of political speech as well as an intensity, a sense, a memory, that despite the couple’s

abhorrence upon discovering the taboo nature of their sexual relations, their fondness, lust and/or love

for one another was/and or remains, in some measure, pleasurable, fulfilling, resonant, and real. This

presents an opening for an interpretation of these relationships as redeemable, if only they and/or their

society could come to terms with their legitimacy. Despite their sometimes overwhelmingly negative and

stereotypical representations of consensual and accidental incestuous relations as disgusting, destructive

and an explicit threat to one’s sense of dignity, personal safety, the community, the repro-normative

family, and the nation, so too do these experiences and their representations present mainstream

audiences with an opportunity to vicariously, tacitly, and affectively experience these relations as

simultaneously benign, tender, erotic, authentic, legitimate, and familiar. They have the potential to affect

within their viewing audiences an awareness and an acknowledgement of their own desires; their

identifications with and affinities to the characters; as well as feelings of inconsequentiality, compassion,

sympathy and support. With respect to the crime procedurals, they also advance the possibility of an

alternative reading wherein danger and harm to oneself and others is recognized as not inherent to the

incestuous subjects and their sex object choice, but rather is a product of society’s prejudices. In this

alternative reading the responsibility for murder does not fall squarely on the shoulders of the

consensually incestuous subjects but is potentially shared by members of a socially intolerant society.

85 Albury, “Reading Porn Reparatively” 2009, 650. Emphasis in the original.

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It has been long argued that cyberspace provides a disinhibiting space, one where individuals can

behave in ways they wouldn’t dream of doing “in real life.”86 Whereas the screen has been thought to

hold apart fantasy and reality, this distinction has been blurred by feminist, cultural and queer

posthumanist theorization of human-technology relations. As discussed in the preceding section,

cybersex can be understood and experienced as real sex, virtual intimacy constitutes real intimacy, and

TFAI, may potentially be experienced as a real incestuous relation. Not only does the Internet offer a

space to engage in and experiment with gender, sex and sexuality it also offers new opportunities to play

out sexual fantasy/reality. Fan culture and the creation of Wincest and Elsana, as well as twincest in

pornography serve as two such examples. But as we have also seen, play, fantasy and the building of

virtual worlds on-line—wherein people imagine, develop, and negotiate creative and alternative sets of

social relations—intersect with sexual realities off-line. To consider the potential implications of this for

the consensual incest taboo and CI’s criminalization, I would like to return briefly to the example of

twincest in internet pornography.

In another on-line article, this time in praise of the Peter’s twins’ incestuous pornography, one

commentator claims to have determined: “The 4 Reasons You’ve Gotten Over Twincest (And Started

Thinking It’s Hot).”87 The reasons, in descending order, include: 4) The biological risks are eliminated; 3)

The love story; 2) They’re hot; and 1) It’s still forbidden. The article’s author claims: “We can talk

endlessly about how erotic it is to think about twin brothers laying down together, but it remains the

ultimate mind fuck, and that’s often what porn is to many: an escape to the ultimate fantasy. That it’s so

wrong makes it so right — if you swing that way.”88 There are a few notable aspects of this argument,

namely the mobilization of non-reproductive sex to simultaneous reify/nullify the taboo’s ableist

foundation, as well as the purifying effect of romantic “twinky” love on taboo sexuality.89 Of most

86 J. Slevin, The Internet and Society (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000). 87 Queerty, 2010, http://www.queerty.com/the-4-reasons-youve-gotten-over-twincest-and-started-thinking-its-hot-20100521. 88 Queerty, 2010, 89 “Twinks” in gay pornography typically refer to thin, hairless, sculpted, teen to 20 something, white men with a clean-cut aesthetic.

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interest to me, however, is the extent to which an acceptance of twincest rests on its ongoing abjection.

The viewer “gets over” twincest’s “not-hot” reality by embracing it as a perpetually disgusting fantasy. That it

is so wrong culturally, as well as in one’s thoughts, makes it so viscerally appealing to one’s (social) body.

But of course the Peter’s twins and their sexual relationship with one another is not inherently wrong,

nor inherently disgusting, nor is it merely fantasy. “The ultimate mind fuck” is that this example of

twincest does not simply blur the disgust-desire dialectic and the mind/body binary, it couples fantasy with

reality in the networked private-public sexual realm.90

Although attempts to theorize the “mindfuck” have met with criticism91 this concept brings

something to bear on my consideration of popular and on-line pornographic representations of CI, AI

and TFAI. As Horsthemke argues, unlike theorizations of “bullshit”92 the term “mindfuck” is unique “in

that it has both a physical and a mental (or psychological) dimension – which produces ‘a kind of

internal semantic dissonance (lexical friction).’93 Like the physical fuck, the mindfuck presents a form of

manipulation that ‘is not exclusively negative; [it] is sometimes used to describe the positive sensation involved in

having, or in being presented with, some striking new idea, or in having some sort of agreeably life-altering experience.”94

For McGinn, a film (such as Memento or The Fight Club), a book, a performance, even an academic lecture

or paper may all be described as a mindfuck with productive results. Combined, pornographic and

mainstream representations of fictional and actual CI, AI and TFAI have brought the mindfuck that is

CI, AI and TFAI to a place of “on/scenity.” 95 That is, our culture has actively brought into its “public

arena the very organs, acts, bodies, pleasures that have heretofore been designated ob/scene and kept

90 For a discussion of the disgust-desire dialectic see William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997). Miller writes, “Even as the disgusting repels, it rarely does so without also capturing our attention. It imposes itself upon us. We find it hard not to sneak a second look or, less voluntarily, we find our eyes doing ‘double-takes’ at the very things that disgust us”, x. 91 See the varied reviews of Colin McGinn, Mindfucking: A Critique of Mental Manipulation (Stocksfield, Acumen, 2008). 92 Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 2005) 93 Kai Horsthemke, “‘On Bullshit’ and ‘Mindfucking’: An Essay on Mental Manipulation in Education”, South African Journal of Philosophy, 33:1 (2014), 35-46. Citing McGinn, 2008, 1. 94 McGinn, 2008, 5. 95 Williams, Porn Studies, 2004

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literally off-scene.”96 Of course the work of the queer, feminist and cultural posthumanists canvassed in

the previous section would extend this mindfuck concept further. If we accept, based on their

theorizations of the virtual and the real, as well as the extension of the body’s boundaries by technology,

that “having sex” and fucking extend to and include cybersex, so too are the Visconti Triplets—who are

described as “playing” with the incest taboo without apparently breaking it because they don’t touch

and/or penetrate one another, also fucking with our minds and the incest taboo. While it is suggested

that the triplets toy with the incest taboo and offer viewers endless pleasure by withholding the

anticipated catharsis of engaging in “actual” sex, the idea of “real” sex has been thoroughly extended, if

not fully destabilized. In this context, CI, AI, and TFAI occurrences and plotlines—with their

ambivalent narratives and complex affective residues and interpretations—make it possible for CI to

become more intelligible, avowed, admissible, consequential, aesthetically meaningful and reformist.

Conclusion

My aim in this article has been to explore the intimate, if not closed, relationship between the

body, sexuality, technology, culture, affect and incest law. As has been demonstrated, these fields

intersections, and the theorization of these intersections, affect our perceptions of our bodies’

parameters, their “proper” sexual objects and relations, their boundary violations, and their legal status.

Queer, feminist and cultural posthumanism, as outlined above, conceive of new technologies as

generative of new epistemologies and ontologies, different layers of reality, and alternative realms of

existing relations and real things. Such interventions collapse into one another dichotomies such as

human/machine, mind/body, nature/culture, material/virtual, and real sex/cybersex. Combination with

cultural and media studies theories of human-technological relations so too are the boundaries between

subject/object, consumer/consumed, and present/absent, feeling/action as well as fantasy/reality

blurred.

While consensual incest and accidental incest, if not technology facilitated accidental incest, have

96 Williams, Porn Studies, 2004

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a long history of representation in literature, film, and art, their content has shifted alongside shifts in the

techno-cultural context in which they are now interpreted. Unsurprisingly, they remain titillating and

popular plotlines, and, as Foucault’s theorization of the repressive hypothesis reminds us, they offer

examples of how the policing of sex is not exclusively dependent upon “the rigor of a taboo, but [rather]

the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses”.97 While historically, and even

contemporarily, these narratives may continue to bolster the normative claim that incest, in its

consensual and accidental guises, is reprehensible, so too do these texts offer opportunities for

investigating the potential pleasures and meaning of sexual and kinship relations. And, while negative

normative representations of AI and CI abound, I would like to suggest that we ignore the benign,

positive and pleasurable dimensions of these relationships to our peril. It may well be, then, that our

current political and technological context has provided an opening for a reimagining of CI and AI

relations in less stigmatized terms. It remains to be seen if and how these shifting cultural scripts will

resonate within our politico-legal imaginary.

97 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1978, 25.