All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Historicizing the Incest Prohibition: The Deceased Wife's Sister Controversy in Nineteenth Century America
| This paper examines nineteenth-century theological debates in the United States concerning the marriage of a deceased wife’s sister and its relation to incest. The question, rooted in exegeses of Leviticus, revolved around whether or not this union was incestuous. Yet the works moved quickly from the question of the deceased wife’s sister to interrogations of the meaning of the incest prohibition itself. The historical study of incest has generally proceeded from social history, seeing incestuous relations as determined historically but relying on a conception of the incest prohibition as a transhistorical entity. Yet, as these theological debates reveal, the incest prohibition itself was a discursive, historical phenomenon that changed over time, and with that change produced various forms of incest. Articulating a sense of crisis resulting from the possibility of incestuous union, these ministers were central in producing incest as a social and cultural problem specific to the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As these theologians were well aware of, it was the intricacies of a clearly developed incest prohibition that made incest possible. By debating the status of a deceased wife’s sister, admittedly a figure on the fringes of the incest prohibition, these ministers were able to develop critiques of the incest prohibition that ranged from an expansion of the included persons to any relation through consanguinity or affinity to a rejection of the incest prohibition as unnecessary at that historical moment. What they all agreed on, however, was the necessity of a textual basis of the incest law, and that the textuality of the incest prohibition was the only way to understand incest itself. Therefore, a cultural history of the incest prohibition, which works through the signification of the law, will reveal new conceptions of incest. In other words, the incest prohibition was productive of incestuous practices, rather than these debates being mere representations in language of real incestuous acts.
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