“Osborn excels at disrupting conventional ‘truths’.”
—Soundings
Forthcoming Book
She’s Such a Liar:
Incest, Knowledge & Power
A MANIFESTO
A daring new critique of Western patriarchy and its enduring control and disciplining of women’s bodies.
For decades, incest has been written about as a private sordid drama, something that concerns one family, not a systemic crime, a social injustice that concerns us all.
In this shrewd and provocative manifesto, Osborn drills down on the core systems, the ordinary material and institutional arrangements that support and maintain incest’s privitization and suppression. She’s Such a Liar is not another book of pot shots, nor is it an easy, anecdotally-based list of grievances against men, but rather a lively, accessible, and radical dissection of the powerful forces that keep us from understanding and doing something about the most common form of sexual violence: incest.
Stay Tuned:
Cover Reveal
Coming Soon
She’s Such a Liar offers a powerful reminder that reconstructing the memory of the past is crucial for the struggles of the present.
If we want to fight the patriarchal abuse that keeps all women oppressed, we need to open windows and doors and promote public discussion of this topic not as a sordid private event but as a political phenomenon, part of the patriarchy’s armamentarium of communicative tactics to keep girls and women shut up and subordinated.
A Manifesto
A call to action for feminists & social justice advocates
When representing and writing about incest (and other forms of sexual violence against girls and women), it’s crucial that we emphasize the systemic nature of the problem. To do so, we need to reconsider our conventional way of talking about incest. I’m referring to the story that we all know so well that focuses on the weak, damaged, and suffering girl (and sometimes a cop or physician playing the role of deus ex machina).
Instead, we need to frame incest for what it truly is: not a surprising anomaly, a rare breakdown of the social order, but rather part of patriarchal culture’s normal social baseline, like racism.
Latest Musings About Incest & Power
What My Grandmother’s Etiquette Lessons Taught Me About Being a Girl
When we’re young, we don’t think much about how we learn what we learn. We just learn. But while writing She’s Such A Liar: Incest, Power & Knowledge and reading about the whole structure of unequal social relations and prejudicial ideologies that support and...
Why I Write About Incest—The Forgotten Feminist Issue
It started this way. In graduate school, while reading a Victorian novel about a father-daughter relationship, I was surprised to discover an incest theme in the book. A quick trip to the library indicated that no other scholar had yet picked this up. Thrilled by my...
Gender and Its Discontents
The book I have just finished, She's Such a Liar, is not just about the institutionalized suppression of incest and patriarchy’s dependence on father-daughter incest. It’s also about our culture and two of our culture’s founding presuppositions, that of gendered...
Invite Susan to Speak
The Medicalization of Incest—Then and Now
This presentation exposes strategies employed by medical professionals to keep incest from public view and to erase incest from the historical record. The social and political consequences of the suppression are also addressed.
Why We Need to Repoliticize Incest
In this presentation, Dr Osborn examines how the medical establishment—functioning as an extended patriarchy—has depoliticized and co-opted the issue of sexual violence.
Sexual Violence Against Girls and the Politics of Shame
In this talk, Dr. Osborn reveals how enduring systems of private, institutional, and political power cultivate feelings of shame and helplessness in victims, undermining collective political mobilization.
What’s in a Word? Re-Visioning the Language of Sexual Violence
Too often, we still rely on euphemisms, sensationalism, and stereotypes that favor perpetrators and show skepticism towards victims. Dr. Osborn’s presentation highlights examples of this language and offers clear, constructive alternatives.
Work in Progress: When she was two, the author’s mother was struck down by polio. Marjorie survived, but her left leg was severely withered and partially paralyzed.