Everybody's Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (review)

If you were alive and cognizant in the 1990s, you probably remember the outpouring of discourse on child sexual abuse: lawsuits over alleged daycare molestations, revelations of perverse satanic family rituals in the woods, and afternoon TV talk shows where guests and audience stridently debated the veracity of sexual abuse memories suddenly recovered after dozens of years. Literary culture was a participant in this carnival, albeit a somewhat more sedate one. After Alice Walker's The Color Purple cleared the way with a Pulitzer Prize in 1984, a spate of similarly well-regarded novels—Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1991 National Book Critics' Circle Award), Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992 National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist), and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (1993 Pulitzer Prize)—made incest into the substance of serious literary fiction. The topic was then successfully middlebrowed once Oprah's Book Club began in 1996, bringing texts like Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone (broadcast 1996), Kaye Gibbons's Ellen Foster (broadcast 1997), and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (broadcast 2000), among others, to the bestseller lists. What was it about that crazy decade that made the sexual abuse of children so visible and so fascinating?

Gillian Harkins's Everybody's Family Romance attempts to answer this question. Her approach is nominally historical. Harkins sees the late twentieth century as the moment in which the bourgeois nuclear family—constituted a century earlier through the distinctive powers of patriarchy, capitalism, and the nation state and narrativized through Freud's iconic "family romance"—begins to fracture. The changed consciousness of gender, sexuality, and power brought on by post-1960s feminist and queer activism has eaten away at what Harkins calls the modernist family form. That liberatory corrosion has been complemented by the same period's shift from "liberal" to "neoliberal" economics and government, defined broadly as "technological mastery, increasingly speculative financial capital, and regulatory panaceas [that] signaled a laissez-faire national individualism tapped into the free play of 'open' markets" (p. 70). Within the neoliberal moment, the modernist/progressive discourse on child sexual abuse, which had focused (when it was willing to acknowledge that such abuse occurred) on "harm," shifted its focus to "risk": "child sexual abuse bec[ame] a resource for new social etiologies of populations 'at risk' . . . recod[ing] the law as the benevolent arm of the state, even as that reach increasingly extended surveillance and policing rather than safeguarding and protection" (p. 67).

This left-Foucauldian reading of the shift from liberalism into neo-liberalism—the historical dimension of Harkins's argument—forms the background for what seems truly to compel Harkins, namely the figurative or representational power of incest within this historical moment. Borrowing from Richard Brodhead's Foucault-inflected analysis of the evolving family, we might say Harkins wants to know "what is being thought when incest is being thought?"¹ To answer this, she relies on a dense web of theoreticians (primarily Foucault but also Freud, Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy DeBord, Stuart Hall, Walter Benjamin, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and Lauren Berlant) to create a semiotics of incest, seeking to understand the cultural work it performs for those who publicly deploy it, including survivors, law and policy makers, helping professionals, academics, and imaginative writers. Given this rich theoretical grounding, perhaps it is unavoidable that Harkins's text periodically bogs down into sentences like: "what kinds of force relations does this delineation of language—from unwritten code of laws to written preterition, from articulatory paradox to catachresis of harm—establish in the governmentalization of the state and the bureaucratization of the social?" (p. 55). Nor should it be surprising to learn that gender, sex, and family are only screens for what is really being thought when incest is being thought. Rather, "incest is our form of nationalism . . . a trope reorganizing family-state relations for mid-twentieth-century welfare governmentality" (p. 27), and the...