This is the first of a two-part post that forms an appeal to feminists; anti-sexual violence and anti-incest activists; social justice activists; anti-sexists; sexual violence prevention advocates; and all who are simply fed up with with our culture’s indifference to sexual violence against girls and women, and with the patriarchal system that permits it.

Let me start with a story.

In October 1875, a young mother dropped her fourteen-year-old daughter, Augustine, at the Salpêtrière Asylum in Paris after the girl started displaying disturbing behaviors and an intractable and very unladylike anger.

Augustine wasn’t amused by her confinement and in front of the asylum’s director, Jean-Martin Charcot, started yelling about fire, blood, her hatred of men, revolution, escape, and rape: “Get rid of the snake you have in your pants…It’s a sin!” At which point, Charcot intervened. “You see how hysterics scream,” he blandly informed his interns as he chloroformed Augustine into unconsciousness. “Noise,” he elaborated, “much ado about nothing.”  Charcot diagnosed Augustine with hysteria, a disease thought to be of the uterus. He treated the locus of her problem, her “hysterogenital” area, with compression, genital manipulation, and electrical shocks.

In other words, instead of investigating the source of  Augustine’s anger and distress, Charcot interpreted Augustine’s troubles as “symptoms,” signs of an illness, a manifestation of a malfunction within as opposed to a response—as she repeatedly emphasized—to an external event that had occurred to her and warranted attention.  Augustine’s agitation was not about the incestuous violence she had experienced; rather, according to Charcot, she was sick; part of her body was dysregulated and out of control.

Charcot’s decision to medicalize Augustine’s anger was nothing new. In fact, as mentioned in my blog post titled  “‘Uterine Melancholy’ and Other Medical Conceits”, since ancient times, physicians have worked to dismiss women’s anger and transform their psychic discontent and suffering into disease markers. As noted in that post, if we go back to ancient Greek myths, we find the Argonaut physician Melampus blaming “uterine melancholy” for the virgins’ “inexplicable” desire to flee men’s sexual and political subordination. 

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During the late 1970s through the early ’90s, incest was considered a core feminist concern. The personal was understood to be connected to the larger political system that subordinates girls and women. Feminists, including Louise Armstrong, author of Kiss Daddy Goodnight: A Speak-Out on Incest and Rocking the Cradle of Sexual Politics: What Happened When Women Said Incest (1978 and 1994), recognized that the medical model misrepresented incest. It was not, Armstrong asserted, a disease form, but a masculinist political tactic used in patriarchal societies to subordinate, suppress, and heterosexualize girls. During the same period, feminist theorists Judith Herman and Lisa Hirschman published their landmark study, Father-Daughter Incest (1981), in which they forcefully recognized incest as political crime that could only take place in patriarchal society. They also—for first time in modern history—took the words of those who had experienced incestuous violence seriously; they declared incest a form of trauma. Unfortunately but perhaps predictably, most reviewers and readers overlooked the authors’ political analysis, and instead grabbed onto the less threatening medical and psychodynamic aspects of incest the authors proposed.

Let me interrupt myself here for a moment. I don’t want anyone reading this to think that I am dismissing the real psychic and physical harm that incest causes. Incestuous violence profoundly disturbs a girl’s bodily integrity and her sense of herself and being in the world. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, She’s Such a Liar: Incest, Knowledge & Power, incestuous violence and the shame that attaches to it can destroy the lifeworlds of girls who have experienced it. Instead, what I’m arguing is that if we continue to allow the medical model of incest to eclipse its political roots and functions, we lose sight of the fundamental reasons incest exists—to control and subordinate girls—and that loss of perspective is deeply dangerous for all of us concerned with women’s inequality.

To be continued next month…