Mother/Daughter Incest: Making Sense of the Unthinkable

Mother/Daughter Incest: Making Sense of the Unthinkable

Feminist and psychological explorations of incest have primarily centred on the sexual violence perpetrated by fathers. This focus is understandable given the reality that 98 percent of perpetrators of sexual assault are men.1 However, as identified in the title of this paper, I would like to briefly explore the issue of sexual violence perpetrated by mothers against their daughters. I will be situating my comments within a feminist analysis of violence and drawing briefly on some insights from feminist and postmodern theory. Given the complexity of the subject matter and the brief nature of this paper, I will primarily discuss how I have sought to make sense of this crime.

As a beginning point, it is important to acknowledge that women are con-structed within a fundamentally hierarchized society where they experience abuse by members of the dominant group and where they also learn both to categorize ‘other ’ marginal members of society as inferior and further to enact various forms of oppression over these ‘others’. Therefore, we need to view women as active agents within these social ‘relations of domination ’ (Flax, 1990: 182) in that women can be co-located as both victims and offenders. This co-location creates a paradox for feminist theory, as primarily women have been viewed as victims of abuse perpetrated by, in the majority, men. However, within our social fabric, there are also situations where some women may enact oppression against other men, women or children.

Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), General Psychology, Gender Studies