Latest Musings
“Uterine Melancholy” and Other Medical Conceits
Here's a fun story you can tell at parties. One gloomy afternoon in the mythological kingdom of Argos, the virgins felt they had just had enough, enough of men's laws and their sexist attitudes, enough of their sexual violence. So they fled to the mountains and hid in...
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...
The Hostess with the Mostest
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...