“Osborn excels at disrupting conventional ‘truths’.”
—Soundings
Now Available (STT PRESS)
She’s Such a Liar:
Incest, Knowledge & Power
A MANIFESTO
A daring critique of Western patriarchy and its control of women’s bodies.
For centuries, incest has been framed as a private, shameful family matter—but it is also a systemic crime and a social injustice, with deep cultural, institutional, and political roots.
In this shrewd and provocative manifesto, Susan Osborn, Ph.D., examines the ordinary social, medical, and legal systems that allow incest to remain hidden and unaddressed.
She’s Such a Liar offers a rigorous, accessible feminist analysis of the forces that silence women, obscure accountability, and normalize disbelief.
By situating incest within broader systems of power and knowledge production, Osborn exposes why this pervasive—and often unspoken—form of sexual violence remains so difficult to confront.
She’s Such a Liar examines incest, but it is equally a deep look at Western patriarchy and the millennia-old cultural, medical, and political structures used to oppress and subordinate women—revealing insights that will resonate with all readers who care about justice, power, and social change.
“She’s Such a Liar is a seismic indictment of the powerful cultural, medical, and political systems that protect abusers and silence survivors.”
—Regina M. Calcaterra, Esq., New York Times best-selling author of Etched in Sand
BUY NOW
A Manifesto
A daring new critique of Western patriarchy and the enduring systems that control and discipline women’s bodies
Dr. Osborn is a writer and leading cultural critic known for challenging accepted truths about power, gender, and violence. Her work focuses on how everyday systems—from families to social institutions—shape what women are allowed to know and say about their own bodies, and how women have historically been controlled and silenced. Writing with clarity and restraint rather than sensationalism, Osborn brings difficult subjects out of the private realm and into public view, asking why silence persists and who benefits from it. She’s Such a Liar: Incest, Knowledge & Power (Shake the Table Press) extends this work by examining incest not as a private tragedy, but as a widespread and systematically suppressed form of violence.
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.
Latest Musings About Incest & Power
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...
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...
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 maintain patriarchal...
Invite Susan to Speak
The Unthinkable: The Medical Suppression 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 discredit survivors. 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.