Book Review: Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History
Fiche mise à jour le 14 novembre 2018
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Book Review: Unspeakable: Father-Daughter Incest in American History
Autre titre :Complément du titre: By Lynn Sacco. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. xii, 351 pp.
Extrait de l'introduction :Lynn Sacco has written an important book on the sexual vulnerability of girls in American history. Unspeakable is a well-researched history of gonorrhea vulvovaginitis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special attention paid to the place of incest in medico-legal knowledge of venereal diseases. As Sacco writes, “gonorrhea vulvovaginitis is a window through which we can see evidence of both the occurrence and the denial of father-daughter incest” (p. 12).
Beginning with an eighteenth-century British case (which would exert undue influence on the knowledge of venereal disease and sexual abuse well into the twentieth century), Sacco demonstrates the shift from an assumption that gonorrhea was associated with sexual contact (despite a medico-legal desire not to implicate “innocent” men in the assault of...
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