From: sbinkley-AT-pipeline.com
Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 17:09:42 -0400
Subject: 3- Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault and the Law_


On Mon, Jun 17, 1996 12:14:18 PM, Malcolm Dunnachie Thompson wrote: 
 
Thanks Malcolm! This seems to me a very coherent and helpful summary.  
When you say: 
 
>Thus, the discourses that constitute the  
>deployment of sexuality circulate around the family. This leads to the  
>curious result of the sexualization of the family, which according to  
>Bell, and here she takes up feminist analyses of incest, can function as  
>an actual incitement to incestuous abuse.  
 
Are you suggesting, as I believe F would have us believe, that those
discourses originate not in the relations within families themselves, but
in the normative institutions (i.e. schools, hospitals, etc.) to which
families are subjected?  and that those discourses operate upon families
without much much help from the actual family members themselves?   
 
Once long ago feminist historians rebelled against a marxist historiography
which claimed to reduce all local struggles and subjective agencies (i.e.
gender oppression) to a meta theory of historical development.  Could a
similar criticism be made of this version of the history of the
sexualization of the family?   
 
sb