Mmm, 'Cesty: Incest and the Adolescent Fantasy

[alixtii]

Consider some texts, all of which count as fannish on my flist (if nowhere else):

• Veronica Mars: A sixteen-year-old girl defies parental authority in many ways including, but not limited to, having sexual relations with three different individuals. (Admittedly this behavior led to her death, but the show consistently portrayed Lilly Kane in a

Comments

[frogfarm]

enters a forbidden girl

o_O

[alixtii]

Yeah, I noticed that when I was adding the tags. That's my secret fantasy version of The Secret Garden, I guess. I'm about to go fix it.

[booster17]

Mary Lennox enters a forbidden girl and carries on a secret relationship

So beautifully easy to take out of context. But a fascinating discussion and train of thought.

[alixtii]

I meant garden, I swear!

'Tis fixed now. Sort of.

[hermionesviolin]

"Of course [the girls] are capable of consent--the very nature of the fantastic world in which they exist assures they are capable of anything."

That idea makes a lot of sense -- about their radical autonomy, etc. -- though I hadn't thought of it that way before. I think my readings of various texts doesn't treat those autonomies as radical because I was always very independent and very comfortable with adults, so I saw/see myself (admittedly an idealized version thereof) in these characters. (As something of a corollary, the absence of parents/parent-figures never pinged me powerfully because I was always allowed to live my own life to a large extent, but I also got along with my parents really well so a lack of parents didn't ping as a fantasy.)

[alixtii]

Well, as a result of my social awkwardness/anxiety and general asociality, my parents were able to adopt a fairly laissez-faire style of parenting--I was never out of the house to get in trouble. I was still strongly pinged by narratives of radical autonomy because they were so often far above what I could expect as an independent child or even as an adult, for example the "taking over the world" sequences in Ender's Game. Which is why they still ping for me very strongly now. It's a will to power thing (which may well be a gendered phenomenon in our society.)

I wanted to be a superhero as a kid, then a ship captain who could discover a land full of superheroes, then a scientist who create a Jekyllian potion to create superheroes, and then a writer who could deal with those creatures in my own way.

[katieliz]

wooh wooh wooh, Veronica Mars lives in Neptune? O_o

[alixtii]

Yep.

[alixtii]

And in S3, she drives a Saturn.

[onelittlesleep]

Establishing their precociousness and adult-nature and how much easier it is to sexualize them is a far cry from establishing incest. I'm totally confused. I just don't get it.

ALSO. I'm in from flist o flist...o flist, I think.

[alixtii]

First off, welcome to the discussion: I'm always eager to find ways to make my arguments more articulate and persuasive, and so love it when someone chimes in they don't understand or don't agree. I'm also very flattered that you found this post from such far-off reaches and found it worthy of critical engagement. Perhaps I can add some context and/or make my argument in a clearer way.

To start, I'm not sure what you mean by "establishing incest," though. If you mean "establishing incest to be canon," then I agree with you that I haven't done so, as that was never my project in the first place. At most, I've claimed to establish the existence within canon (that is to say, within the source text) of a subtext of incest: 'cestiness. Ari (wisdomeagle) and I both agree that Keith Mars isn't really shagging his daughter, if for no other reason that Keith Mars isn't "really" doing anything at all; he is a fictional character in a television show, played by an actor.

Now sometimes it is useful, especially in a fannish context, to play "How many

[onelittlesleep]

I'm just saying there are two separate taboos here. Child sexuality and incest. And one made plausible does not create a direct bridge to the other. So I still don't get why you seemed to explain the pairing plausibility, in fiction, through proving child precociousness and sexuality.

ALSO. Why does child-sexuality have to exist for their to be incest? Most of the incest pairings I've seen have been between two consenting adults. So...I don't know, dude! I'm still confused. I'll read this again in a little bit, after I've had some coffee.

[alixtii]

Child-sexuality doesn't have to exist for there to be incest, but a problematization of consent is at work in both instances, which is why they are able to be lumped together for the purposes of this argument. (I'm assuming that the problem with incest is that it problematizes consent, and yes, I'll admit that this is an assumption, that I'm sure it is possible to have an objection to fictional depictions of incest based solely on genetic grounds, but those are not objections to which I am particularly interested in replying.)

For example, to go back to the example of Veronica Mars (since we don't really seem to have many fandoms in common), the first time we see Veronica she is 16, above the age of consent. So it is only in response to a short list of individuals--her father, her principal, arguably the county sheriff--that her power of consent is really meaningfully problematized. So the incest creates the possibility of the dynamic I'm talking about when the taboo of childhood sexuality cannot do so on its own (and this becomes