Abstract

Incest is a highly charged issue in our society, and although many groups and individuals have tried for more than thirty years to eradicate the practice of incest, our society remains incest-prone. Through a careful feminist analysis of incest discourses, I argue that the concept of agency embedded in some traditional epistemological and current ethical/political theories reinforces the practice of incest in our society. In response, I propose an alternative conception of agency, one that will encourage new knowledge practices and promote an incest-free society through the recognition of people as socially embedded and constituted and able to exercise varying degrees of power and choice in their social interactions. ;I begin my dissertation with a Foucauldian style cultural analysis of the traditional/dominant dictionary definition of incest and the language usage associated with the concept "incest." I argue that they reinforce attitudes and practices that support our incest-prone society because they imply equal, or near equal, agency between those involved in incestuous interactions, an attitude that is contradicted by victim/survivors' testimonial accounts. ;Next, I analyze two epistemological theories and show that neither values testimony as a source of knowledge, and that those who produce testimonial accounts are denied full epistemic agency because they produce rather than judge knowledge. Then, I examine the conception of agency in two prominent ethical/political theories and argue that victim/survivors of incest are denied full moral agency because they were acted upon when they were incested. Also, in these analyses I show how issues of age, gender, and role-authority, which result in power differentials between incesters and those they incest, reinforce myth-based beliefs that support dismissal of victim/survivors' testimonial accounts. ;Finally, after proposing an alternative definition of the concept "incest," I argue for an understanding of agency as interaction between interdependent individuals-in-community rather than action done by an autonomous individual upon a passive recipient. Adoption of an agent-to-agent dynamic validates moral judgments by those acted upon as well as knowledge produced by individuals-in-community out of their lived experiences.