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

[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 children had Lady Macbeth?" (thus my icon), to try to find the least-hypothesis, most logical extrapolation of canon. That isn't however, what we are doing when we are looking for 'cest. With the exception of Laz/Lor, I don't think any of the pairings given above qualify as canon. But then, I don't think Sam/Frodo is canon either.

I do think the given pairings are 'cesty (or rather, those pairings between relatives are), that is there is a real, demonstrable element of the text such that these pairings lend themselves to being read as incestuous, just as Frodo/Sam is slashy, lending itself to being read as homoerotic. This is what I mean when I say that "[t]his is the context in which fictional incest thrives."

The listing of pairings, including both incest and cross-gen, is a list of some of Ari's and my (and others') favorite pairings. The question, then, was why do we 'ship these mostly extracanonical pairings, what elements of the relationships in canon cry out to us to sexualize them. This post was an attempt to answer that question, to place our 'shipping in a context of a more extensive fannish hermeneutic. You could say that I am an articulating a strategy of reading, a strategy which is admittedly nonstandard (in the way in which slash strategies are nonstandard) but not--I would argue--as far from more standard strategies as one might think, especially in fandom. The claim was, and is, that we did not just "invent them in our minds"--that there was a real characteristic of the text to which we were responding, which (in part) consists of the precociousness/adult-nature of the pre/teen characters to which you allude. (Indeed, going back to Laz/Lor, the canonical incest in Heinlein's text stems from exactly this dynamic, I'd argue.)

There have been plenty of meta posts asking "why slash?" and "why het?"--this post was mostly intended to partially answer "why incest?" and "why cross-gen?" and not really do all that much more.

I'd further developed what exactly it is I mean when I claim that a text is 'cesty, or 'slashy, or het-tastic, or whatever, in this post, "Reality's Subtext".

Does any of that make things more clear, or have I just further confused the issue for you?

[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 more and more true as each season passes and Veronica gets older and more mature).

And one made plausible does not create a direct bridge to the other.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but what I'm trying to argue is that they're both made plausible in the same way: by showing that the problematization of consent which would ordinarily act as an obstacle does not actually apply. This is the case whether it is a case of incest, of childhood sexuality, or both.