Incest, Exogamy, and Jewishness on Roseanne

This paper examines a narrative arc in the sitcom Roseanne involving Roseanne Conner’s physically abusive father; a storyline that echoed Roseanne Barr’s real life allegations regarding physical and sexual abuse by her father. I contend that the fictional Conner family’s part Jewishness is overlooked in Roseanne scholarship, yet vital to an understanding of how the show depicts Ashkenazi Jewishness’s complex relationship to whiteness, especially given the historical context of how sexual antisemitism associated Jews with incest and sexual predation in nineteenth-century discourse about Jews. Though this stereotype has largely receded, I argue that reading Roseanne as a liminally Jewish text about liminal Jewishness, and simultaneously dealing structurally with incest and exogamy, reveals that the very resistance towards identifying the Conners as part Jewish may stem from the taboo figure of the sexually abusive Jewish father. In exploring both the veiled vertical incest dynamic between Roseanne Conner and her father, and the lateral incest dynamic between Roseanne’s daughter Darlene and pseudo-adoptive son David, the show advances a nuanced, and radical, incest narrative.