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Late modernity's binary intrigue of child sexuality/abuse is understood as a backlash phenomenon reactive to a general trans-Atlantic crisis concerning the interlocking of kinship, religion, gender, and sexuality. Tellingly dissociated from 1980s gay liberation and recent encounters between queer theory and kinship studies, the child abuse theme articulates modernity's guarded axiom of tabooed incest and its projected contemporary predicament "after the orgy"-after the proclaimed disarticulation of religion-motivated, kin-pivoted, reproductivist, and gender-rigid socialities. "Child sexual abuse" illustrates a general situation of decompensated nostalgia: an increasingly imminent loss of the child's vital otherness is counter-productively embattled by the late modern overproduction of its banal difference, its status as "minor. " Attempts to humanize, reform, or otherwise moderate incest's current "survivalist" and commemorative regime of subjectivation, whether by means of ethical, empirical, historical, critical, legal, or therapeutic gestures, typically trigger the latter's panicked empiricism. Accordingly, most "critical" interventions, from feminist sociology and anthropology to critical legal studies, have largely been collusive with the backlash: rather than appraising the radical precariousness of incest's ethogram of avoidance in the face of late modernity's dispossessing analytics and semiotics, they tend to feed its state of ontological vertigo and consequently hyperextended, manneristic forensics.
Keywords: incest taboo, childhood sexuality, child sexual abuse, anthropology, queer theory
We no longer practise incest, but we have generalized it in all its derivative forms. (Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p. 121)
The end of kinship is the ending of kinship. (Shell, The End of Kinship, p. xi)
It might, then, be necessary to rethink the prohibition on incest as that which sometimes protects against a violation, and sometimes becomes the very instrument of a violation. (Butler, Undoing Gender, p. 160)
Known as Crimen Sollicitationis, a 1962 "instruction" from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or Holy Office) codifying procedures to be followed in cases of misuse of the sacrament of Penance for impertinent advances to penitents, required a sworn submission to "inviolabile secretum," "secretum Sancti Officii [...] in omnibus et cum omnibus."1 Resonating with erstwhile clinical consensus throughout Europe that societal "hysteria" over initial tensions was the proximate mechanism of sorrow in like cases, the 60-page document sought de-escalation for the greater good. It was to sit in archives unmentioned and unpublished, until...