Sexuality & Culture

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-021-09856-3

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Cripping Incest Discourse(s)

Ryan Thorneycroft1 

Accepted: 29 March 2021

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
2021

Abstract
In this article, I chart the ableist presuppositions associated with the incest taboo.
Specifically, I interrogate two ways in which incest is deployed as a particular form
of knowledge (and consequently prohibited because of such knowledges): first, the
knowledge that incest creates inbreeding and attendant ‘abnormalities’; and second,
that incest is a threat to the sanctity of the family. I challenge both these assertions
on the basis that they are grounded in ableist (and heteronormative) ways of think-
ing. While I dwell on the theoretical aspects of this analysis, in the second half of
the article I move to explore the ethico-political dimensions that arise from such
theorisations. Drawing on the intersections of crip/queer theory, I wonder whether
we should ‘fuck the future’, or whether we should imagine a queer/crip future that
is not yet here. Such choices, I hope, will help us inform our understandings and
approaches towards incestuous practices.

Keywords  Crip theory · Ableism · Incest · Incest taboo

Introduction

Incest defies easy categorisation and definition, yet it is popularly understood as a

sexual relationship between related people, and contemporaneously recognised
as operating within the nuclear family. Contemporary attitudes towards incest are
almost universally constituted as morally repugnant. Such is the power of these atti-
tudes, society is cloaked by the incest taboo—the moral, social, legal, and political
prohibition of sexual relations between closely related people. Society’s fear goes

* Ryan Thorneycroft
r.thorneycroft@westernsydney.edu.au
1
School of Social Sciences, Western Sydney University, Sydney, Australia

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 R. Thorneycroft

even further: we cannot talk about it, we cannot desire it, and especially, we can-
not talk about desiring it. Part of the effacement of incest in social discourse also
seems to be due to the conflation between incest and incest abuse (see Bell, 1993
and Salter, 2016 for examples).1 Conversely, the topic of incest has been discussed
thoroughly by many of history’s leading political theorists; from Plato to Cicero,
Augustine and Aquinas, Hobbes and Locke, Hegel and Nietzsche, Freud and Lacan,
Foucault and Butler, and many more. It may very well be that the efforts to censor
culminates in an ‘incitement to discourse’ (Foucault, 1978).
Exhaustive attempts have been made throughout history to try and explain the
incest taboo. Durkheim ([1897] 1963), for example, posited that the incest taboo
arose from the rule of exogamy—that is, the custom of marrying outside of clans—
that evolved in preliterate communities. Freud ([1913] 2001), informed largely by
an analysis of Australian aboriginals and his psychoanalytic imperatives, felt that
the nurturing relationships between parents and offspring—and particularly between
mother and son—created (repressed) sexual desires, and in turn a threat that needed
to be renounced to help preserve the stability of the nuclear family and, in turn, soci-
ety at large. Thus, for Freud ([1913] 2001), the rule of exogamy and the incest taboo
were created in fear of our sexual desires and their (perceived) deleterious outcomes.
Westermarck (1894) took a very different approach in his account, and argued that
closely related people do not, contrary to Durkheim and Freud, share erotic feelings
between each other. This absence, according to Westermarck, explains the phenome-
non of exogamy. Westermarck (1926: 99) further argued that inbreeding is ‘injurious
to the species’ and leads to inbreeding depression (a point I turn to shortly).
More contemporaneously, Parsons (1954) argues that incestuous desires are a key
driver in the emotional growth of children, and that desire must be repressed to help
nourish growth in broader extrafamilial roles. Specifically, incest must be prohibited
to ensure a person’s success beyond their own family (Parsons, 1954). In contrast,
Lévi-Strauss ([1949] 1967) suggested that societies become integrated via two fun-
damental mechanisms: (a) the redistribution of scarce resources and (b) exchange
systems built upon reciprocal gift giving. On this latter point, it is the relationship
imbricated in the exchange, and not the objects exchanged themselves, that builds
solidarity and integration. Thus, for Lévi-Strauss, exogamy, working as a form of
gift giving and exchange, is nonviable without the incest taboo. Many of these con-
tributions have their own benefits and drawbacks, and some help to explain incest
avoidance rather than the incest taboo.
It is virtually impossible to provide a comprehensive account of the incest
taboo within this relatively short text, but ultimately, that is not my intention. Not-
ing Turner and Maryanski’s (2016: 26) observation that ‘virtually every explana-
tion that has been offered for its origins contains an element of the answer as to

1
  While incest can be violent, I do not think this is always the case (for example, think of two adult rela-
tions who willingly and consensually enter into a sexual relationship). I am also reminded of Butler’s
(2004: 157) comment that: ‘I keep adding this qualification: “when incest is a violation,” suggesting that
I think that there may be occasions in which it is not’. If violence does transpire, it is ‘by virtue of the
consciousness of social shame’ (Butler 2004: 157). Also see Wolf (2014) for similar comments.

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Cripping Incest Discourse(s)

why it emerged’, I refine my inquiry to two contemporarily powerful, yet equally

biologically reductionist, conceptualisations of the incest taboo. Particularly, I am
interested in two accounts of the incest taboo that butt up against disability politics:
first, the knowledge that incest creates inbreeding and attendant ‘abnormalities’; and
second, that incest is a threat to the sanctity of the institution of the family. I chal-
lenge both these assertions on the basis that they are grounded in ableist (and heter-
onormative) modes of thinking.
I am motivated to insert disability politics into this discussion because of the
ways in which disability figures as an absent presence (Derrida, 1978, 1997) within
incest discourse(s). As Linton (1998: 87) notes, ‘[a]lthough the so-called reflective
disciplines, such as philosophy, literature…rhetoric, art, and history, evoke dis-
ability everywhere, they seem unable to reflect upon it’.2 These contributions are
approached in ableist and taken-for-granted ways that take disability as an objec-
tivist and ontologically negative position that fails to engage in an alternative and
ultimately efficacious engagement with progressive crip politics (discussed shortly).
Thus, in prohibiting incest, scholars draw upon disability as a justification for its
prohibition, and in so doing, adopt the perspective that disability is only and always
(reductively) abnormal and negative (and something to be regulated in fear that dis-
ability is created). My contribution seeks to highlight the ubiquitous yet simultane-
ously invisible nature of ableism that operates in our society—that is, behaviours,
attitudes, and beliefs that presume that the abled body is the normal, natural, and
better body (Campbell, 2009).
Rather than adopt the position that disability is negative, my contribution seeks
to shift the gaze from disability to ability and ableism to consider the ways in which
disability is made a problem in the first place. Davis (1995: 24) argues that it is
not disabled people who have problems, but rather, the ‘problem is the way that
normalcy [and ableism] is constructed to create the “problem” of the disabled per-
son’. A central thread of this essay is to foreground ableist processes, relations, and
effects, and I use the incest taboo to do that work. While my exposition of inces-
tuous discourses may not do justice to the realities and specificities of incestuous
practices, I am rather more interested in deconstructing and subverting ableist (and
heteronormative) thinkings, doings, and beings. Ableism creates a set of effects that
pathologise disabled bodies and lives, and relatedly, instantiate the prohibition of
incest. These processes and practices must be visibilised and problematised if we are
interested in arresting these cycles of violence.
My exposition can also be understood as an engagement with crip theory and
cripping. Borrowing from Halperin’s notion of queer, I take crip to.
not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object [but to acquire]
its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. [Crip] is by definition
whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is

2
  I think the same can be said of incest. Seery (2013: 6) also notes that while incest is subjected to theo-
retical discussion, it ‘usually [sits] more at the margins than in the mainstream’.

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 R. Thorneycroft

nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an

essence (1995: 62, italics in original).
Further, I take crip to define disabled identity ‘oppositionally and relationally
but not necessarily substantively, not as a positivity but as a positionality, not as a
thing but as a resistance to the norm’ (Halperin, 1995: 66). In this way, my account
includes, but not exclusively, bodies interpellated as disabled, and I invoke aspects
of disability politics and crip theory to unpack the ways in which incest discourses
are ableist. My interpretation of crip is reflective of my scholarly trajectory; of a
movement from disability studies to queer theory and then to crip theory. I am
interested in the constitution of a space or zone between crip and queer, and noting
Fritsch and McGuire’s (2018: vii) argument that both ‘flaunt the failures of norma-
tivity’, I am interested in blurring the boundaries between them. As McRuer (2002)
also notes, compulsory abledness is intertwined with compulsory heterosexuality.
Both of these vectors of power and oppression—(compulsory) ableness and hetero-
sexuality—emerge throughout my analysis, and I am interested in using crip(ping)
as a political and methodological tool to expose oppressive, normative, and ableist
(and heteronormative) regimes, and in so doing, re-writing, or cripping, existing
assumptions, histories, theories, and embodiments.
This essay starts by interrogating two ways in which incest is deployed as a par-
ticular form of knowledge: first, the knowledge that incest creates inbreeding and
attendant ‘abnormalities’; and second, that incest is a threat to the sanctity of the
institution of the family. I challenge both these assertions on the basis that they are
grounded in ableist (and heteronormative) modes of thinking. Noting the increasing
allegiances between crip and queer theory and politics (see: Thorneycroft, 2020a, b;
Gallop, 2019; Kafer, 2013; McRuer, 2006), I then turn to the social and anti-social
threads in queer theory, and imagine whether we should fuck the future (see: Edel-
man, 2004), or imagine a queer/crip utopia that is yet to come (see: Muñoz, 2019).
Incest (discourses) can be imagined both within and beyond both these contexts and
imaginaries. My political approach in this text involves an incitement to discourse
(mentioned earlier) that works to re-invent the existing discourses and practices
through which incest is currently constituted.

Incest Creates Inbreeding and Biological Abnormalities(?)

A common feature in incest discourse is the ‘problem’ of inbreeding and its atten-
dant effects (Bateson, 2005; Bell, 1993; Bittles, 2005; Sesardic, 2005). Specifically,
the problem of inbreeding, which refers to two people who share a common ancestor
and engage in sexual intercourse (Bittles, 2005), is presented as posing significant
risks to potential offspring, and thus, should be discouraged to preserve the wellbe-
ing of future populations, families, and society at large (Bell, 1993). Such an inter-
pretation can be understood as a form of (latent) eugenics. Westermarck (1894: 352)
argued more than one hundred years ago:

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Cripping Incest Discourse(s)

those of our ancestors who avoided in-and-in breeding would survive, while
the others would gradually decay and ultimately perish. Thus an instinct would
be developed which would be powerful enough, as a rule, to prevent injurious
unions.
This assumption of the origins and continuation of the incest taboo has not
always been so prevalent, and the reception of these findings have ebbed and flowed
over the preceding years (Shor & Simchai, 2009). Recently, however, Wolf (2005:
10) has claimed that Westermarck’s assertions have been ‘proved right’, and it is fair
to say that the majority of scholarly work—and public opinion, for that matter—
now adopts Westermarck’s position (Ansermet et al., 2010). This position holds that
incest creates premature deaths, birth defects, intellectual disability, and more (see:
Seemanová, 1971; Wolf, 2014).
Thus, one of the prevailing justifications for the incest taboo is that it prevents
inbreeding and the attendant risk of biological ‘abnormalities’ (Bergelson, 2013).
To put it even more succinctly: incest should be avoided because disabled babies
will be born. That society accepts this proposition because of such ‘danger’ points
to the ubiquity of ableism. Ableism is premised on the idea that the abled body is
the normal, species-typical, natural, and better body, and one does not need to think
too much about the ways in which disabled people are abjected to consider how
hegemonic ableism is in society (Campbell, 2001, 2009). Ableism can be under-
stood as a form of normative violence—in that norms are violent to ways of being
for particular people (disabled people in this instance) (Butler, 2004).3 Given the
ways in which society accepts and adheres to the incest taboo, I suggest that society
is ableist, and this is the case because the prospect of producing disabledness blocks
someone’s quest or desire for incest.
Much existing scholarship on the connection between incest and disability prefig-
ures disability as negative; for example, Ansermet et al. (2010) frame the possibility
as a ‘risk for severe problems’, and Kanaan et al. (2008: 371) suggest a ‘general plan
of action’ is required in response to the ‘risk’ of incest:
[a] public health program with [a] multiapproach strategy involving educating
people, increasing awareness, and probably trying to push the government to
take some measures should be executed to inform the public…about the antic-
ipated genetic consequences of consanguineous4 marriages, the existence of
prenatal diagnosis, and neonatal screening as useful means to deal with such
issues, and genetic counseling whenever necessary.
Even the terms deployed point to dis/ableist beliefs and practices: ‘retardation’
(Kanaan et al., 2008), ‘malformations’ (Shawky and Sadik (2011), ‘defects’ (Kavi-
any et al., 2016), ‘anomalies’ (Gaafar et al., 2014), ‘disorders’ (Sarfaraz et al., 2017),

3
 Also see Campbell (2018), Goodley (2014), Thorneycroft (2020a), and Thorneycroft and Asquith
(2021) to consider the ways in which ableist (norms) imprison and violate abled people.
4
 The term consanguineous originates from two Latin words ‘con’ (meaning ‘shared’) and ‘sanguis’
(meaning ‘blood’), thus describing relations between two people who share blood (that is, a common
ancestor) (Kanaan, Mahfouz, and Tamim 2008).

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 R. Thorneycroft

and so on. These approaches constitute disability as negative, and by association,

forbids incest because of the prospects of disabledness.
Several other shortcomings can be identified when examining the prohibition
of incest that is based on ableist grounds. Bell (1993), Bergelson (2013), Cahill
(2005), and others have all argued that the inbreeding argument is a flawed justifi-
cation for prohibiting incest. The basis for this argument is that if incest is wrong
because of the risk of inbreeding, then society should not prohibit conduct where
childbirth cannot occur. Bell (1993: 131) explains from a legislative/legalistic
standpoint:
legislation based on such an objection to incest would logically have to disre-
gard cases where there was no danger of conception, e.g. because one or both
parties was unable to conceive for medical reasons, for reasons of health or age
(too young or too old). This limits the criminality of the act to specific groups
(the fertile) and specific times (during fertile years, possibly even fertile days).
It further limits the criminality to the consequences of the act, suggesting that
if no pregnancy follows, the act itself was not wrong. It suggests there is noth-
ing intrinsically wrong with incestuous intercourse, but the possible conse-
quences are such that it should be criminalised.
Bergelson (2013) also adds to this picture by documenting that in some jurisdic-
tions the prohibition of incest also applies to marriage (where sexual relations are
not a prerequisite), and sexual practices that cannot result in childbirth (fellatio and
cunnilingus, for example).
It also stands that two unrelated individuals can engage in sexual relations and
create/produce a disabled child. How, then, can we explain the justification that
incest should be prohibited to prevent disabledness? Related and unrelated people
can produce disabledness. This is where eugenics rears its head. The production of
a disabled child by unrelated people is pitied, mourned, and labelled an accident
and a tragedy (Swain & French, 2000); in contrast, the production of a disabled
child by related people, and particularly (related) disabled people, is understood as
insidious pollution and contamination (Douglas, 1966). The production of disabled-
ness by related people is an unfortunate blip, but the production of disabledness by
related people is a dangerous outpouring that needs to be contained. The prohibition
of incest, and its justification, is an ableist technology that works to minimise the
number of disabled people in society. The effect of this prohibition is to maintain the
eugenically based goal of maintaining a clean gene pool.
In problematising incest, it is worth considering what kind of knowledges ema-
nate from this image of incest (that incest creates biological ‘abnormalities’). First,
it constructs incest as occurring between a man and woman engaging in hetero-
sexual sexual intercourse, and who are closely related by blood (in order for the
‘abnormality’ to occur). Cahill (2005: 1546) writes that ‘incest has been used to
define a normative vision of sexuality and the family, and to trigger disgust toward
otherwise consensual intimate relationships’. This image of incest implies an abled
couple (because they are normative, fertile, and healthy), and dictates they are not
allowed to produce a disabled child. Perhaps paradoxically, they will be constituted
as disabled and/or mad if they engage in incestuous desire/practice (Gilman, 1998),

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and any resultant child will further be constituted as disabled/mad. The logic of the
incest taboo can then be understood as ableist (and heteronormative), in that it works
to ensure that abled (and heterosexual) people stay in that position, and be unable to
produce any other disabled subjects (through childbirth). The incest taboo works not
only to forbid disability, but simultaneously, and perhaps more potently, to maintain
the abled body.
Second, this image of incest constructs any child born from an incestuous rela-
tionship as a ‘victim’ (Bell, 1993). To be interpellated as disabled and a victim from
birth ‘exacerbate[s] exploitation’ (Alcoff, 2009: 134) and brings into question issues
of slow death (Berlant, 2007), social death (Butler, 2000, 2015), and necropolitics
(Mbembe, 2003). The child is born doubly abjected (Thorneycroft 2020b); if they
somehow manage to avoid a diagnosis of disability—through processes of medi-
cal interpellation that are presumed ontological and biological but which is actually
materialised through social (re)signification (see Butler, 1990)—the child will still
be deemed disabled in another sense vis-à-vis processes of victimisation. What I am
arguing here is that the category of victim is in many ways a disabled category, and
vice versa. To be labelled a victim is to be dis-abled, and to be dis-abled is to be a
victim. This is the case because of the ways in which both subject positions are neg-
atively vulnerabilised and paternalised (see Gilson, 2016; Hahn, 1986). Disability
is popularly conceptualised as an inability to do things (see Titchkosky, 2007), and
victims are often conceived as incapable and unable to live their lives due to the vio-
lation and trauma they receive. To be clear, this conceptualisation is not the problem
of disabled/victimised people, but more with the ways in which society treats such
people. Alcoff (2009: 124) suggests that ‘to be a victim is to lack dignity’, but this
is not a problem for victimised (and disabled) people but the ways in which ‘non-
victims’ constitute and treat victims (and disabled people). To sum up: incest should
not occur at risk of being interpellated as disabled.
Thus far I have problematised one of the ableist foundations of the incest taboo
that is anchored by biological ‘reasoning’; that is, the ‘risk’ of producing disability
provides the foundation/justification for the prohibition of incest. I have argued that
this is a form of biological eugenics founded on ableist grounds. In the following
section I turn to a broader issue: the idea that incest is a threat to the sanctity of the
institution of the family.

Incest is a Threat to the Sanctity of the Institution of the Family(?)

The incest taboo and its enforcement reinforce particular visions of the family, and
these visions are ableist in orientation. Cahill (2005: 1601) argues that incest ‘con-
tinues to signify any non-normative arrangement that poses a serious risk to our tra-
ditional understandings of the family’. In the context of gender and sexuality, Butler
(2000) suggests that same-sex relationships and incest represent departures from the
norm, and that such deviations twist the prototypical ways in which sexual identity
is created and maintained within the family structure. Butler (2004: 158) argues:

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the law that would secure the incest taboo as the foundation of symbolic
family structure states the universality of the incest taboo as well as its nec-
essary symbolic consequences. One of the symbolic consequences of the
law so formulated is precisely the derealization of lesbian and gay forms of
parenting, single-mother households, blended family arrangements in which
there may be more than one mother or father, where the symbolic position is
itself dispersed and rearticulated in new social formations.
Butler (2004) suggests that incest is scapegoated as a problem to protect the
sanctity of the nuclear family structure, or in Cahill’s (2005: 1602) interpretation,
‘incest is a way of describing what is troubling about those new formations’. The
incest taboo functions to preserve a particular kind of (normative) family unit.
Elsewhere Butler (2000: 71) writes:
[c]onsider that the horror of incest, the moral revulsion it compels in some,
is not that far afield from the same horror and revulsion felt toward lesbian
and gay sex, and is not unrelated to the intense moral condemnation of vol-
untary single parenting, or gay parenting, or parenting arrangements with
more than two adults involved (practices that can be used as evidence to
support a claim to remove a child from the custody of the parent in several
states in the United States). These various modes in which the oedipal man-
date fails to produce normative family all risk entering into the metonymy
of that moralized sexual horror that is perhaps most fundamentally associ-
ated with incest.
Incest, then, is used as a substitute to all forms of non-normative practices and
relations. Cahill (2005: 1602) suggests that incest ‘stands for the transgression of
certain major cultural values, the values of a particular pattern of relations among
persons’. Incest is then not simply used to forbid genetic ‘abnormal’ inheritance
(that is, disability)—although it is to a large degree—but to reinforce particular
types of (normative) social relations and practices.
While I agree with the central tenets of this argument, I would crip the above
explanation and suggest that the characterological figure(s) presented in this
account is of an abled body (McRuer, 2002, 2006; Samuels, 2002). While non-
normative sexuality and gender subjects are the topic of Butler’s inquiry, I sug-
gest that before this, these subjects are (pre)figured as abled. Samuels (2002: 59)
suggests that the ‘texts and characters [Butler] chooses to analyze are consistently
discussed in terms of their sexed, gendered, and racial formations, not their physi-
cal or mental abilities’. Moreover, Butler’s work ‘is en-abled by its own reliance
upon a stable, functional body that is able to walk, talk, give birth, see, and be
seen’ (Samuels, 2002: 65). Just as Butler (1993: viii) acknowledges that scholars
‘forget that “the” body comes in genders’, so too does it come with dis/abilities.
To be clear, it is not my intention to criticise Butler for omitting dis/ability from
her work; Butler (1993: 18–19) observes:
any analysis which foregrounds one vector of power over another will doubt-
less become vulnerable to criticisms that it not only ignores or devalues the

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others, but that its own constructions depend on the exclusion of the others in
order to proceed. On the other hand, any analysis which pretends to be able
to encompass every vector of power runs the risk of a certain epistemological
imperialism which consists in the presupposition that any given writer might
fully stand for and explain the complexities of contemporary power.
No author or text should or could dictate the power structures existent in the
social and cultural world (Butler, 1993). Instead, I am simply suggesting that the
explanation proffered by Butler (pre)figures an abled body, and as such, I would
add to her account and suggest that the incest taboo works to reinstantiate an abled
and normative cisgender heterosexual family structure. The prohibition of incest is
used to not only enforce (hetero) normative family structures, but also to police the
boundaries of abledness and ensure that it is preserved.
A similar argument can also be made in relation to Butler’s (1990) discussion
of the incest taboo and its ableist origins. While Butler focuses on the incest taboo
and its relationship to the heterosexual matrix (which she later calls ‘heterosexual
hegemony’ and can also be understood as a form of compulsory heterosexuality—
see Rich, 1980), I suggest that abledness also factors in this discussion. Butler (1990:
63) argues that the ‘resolution of the Oedipal complex affects gender identification
through not only the incest taboo, but, prior to that, the taboo against homosexual-
ity’. Succinctly, Butler (1990) argues that the taboo against incest is preceded by the
taboo against homosexuality—yet strikingly offers no evidence other than the claim
‘it would appear’ (Butler, 1990: 64). At this juncture I am not that interested in what
comes first (the incest taboo or the prohibition of homosexuality), but I would say
that abledness is interwoven with both. McRuer (2002: 89) writes:
the system of compulsory able-bodiedness that produces disability is thor-
oughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that pro-
duces queerness; that—in fact—compulsory heterosexuality is contingent on
compulsory able-bodiedness and vice versa.
Compulsory abledness is intertwined with compulsory heterosexuality; they are
norms that are performatively embodied and enacted. If we can accept that abled
bodies are constituted through the prohibition of incest, then the taboo against dis-
ability sits alongside the taboo against homosexuality. It is not then surprising to
recognise the ways in which disabled people are understood as queer just as queer
people are understood as disabled (McRuer, 2002). Just think of the ways in which
disabled people are desexualised, asexualised, and/or hypersexualised, and the ways
in which queer people are constituted as disabled through medicalisation/sickness/
psychiatry (see: Baynton, 2001 and McRuer, 2017). To crip Butler’s (1990: 64)
phrasing, then: ‘it would appear that the taboo against homosexuality [and disabled-
ness] must precede the heterosexual [and abled/ableist] incest taboo’. One need only
consider the ways in which the incest taboo is justified by the ‘threat’ of disability—
as discussed in the previous section—to understand how accurate this representation
is.
The incest taboo sits alongside a whole range of technologies that work to pro-
duce and regulate abled (and heteronormative) family structures and relationships.

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 R. Thorneycroft

Disabled people are often asexualised, desexualised, and/or hyper-sexualised (Gal-

lop, 2019; Mollow, 2012). The first two terms (asexualisation and desexualisa-
tion) aligns with the goals of a heteronormative and ableist public, but the last term
(hypersexualisation) is something that must be contained, and indeed, addressed
‘properly’ to produce the first two terms and attendant heteronormativity and
ableism (Clare, 2015, 2017; Kim, 2011). Disabled people are often excluded from
sexual education, their ‘inappropriate behaviour’ is heavily monitored, sexual health
facilities are often unwelcoming or inaccessible, and many hold the belief that sex-
ual practices amongst disabled people is disgusting (Gallop, 2019; Lehrer, 2012;
Shildrick, 2007). As Mollow and McRuer (2012: 1) comment, sex and disability
is understood ‘if not antithetical in the popular imagination, then certainly incon-
gruous’. Many disabled people, much like queer and racial minorities, are also sub-
jected to the idea that they should not—or cannot—contribute to the growth of the
human population (again, a form of eugenics) (Desjardins, 2012). Clare (2015: 130)
notes how disabled people are constituted as ‘genderless, asexual undesirables’, and
many disabled couples are also encouraged to avoid sexual practices, and most cer-
tainly not to have children (Liddiard, 2018). The incest taboo is just another technol-
ogy within the ableist toolbox that works to negate and disavow crip families.

What Does ‘Cripping Incest’ Do?

What kind of political endeavour has been engaged in this exposition? What does
cripping existing incest scholarship actually do? At this particular moment I am not
that interested in the ethico-political dimensions of my analysis than in the theo-
retical contribution. This means I am not that interested in whether subjects start
to engage in incestuous practices, but rather, I am more interested in contextualis-
ing abledness, ableism, and incest discourse(s) for the purposes of unravelling and
decomposing these very systems. My contribution can be contextualised as an active
process of taking unquestioned and taken-for-granted (ableist) ideas, practices, and
relations, and making them unfamiliar and strange to explore alternative and com-
bative ways of living, being, and doing. I have opened up an intellectual space that
rethinks dominant discursive constructions that otherwise negate abledness and
ableism, yet I have worked them in to the topic to expose their absent presence.
Much like other forms of post-structuralist dis/ability studies, I have attempted to
move disability/crip beyond the influence of medical (and reductive) discourses, and
in so doing, move beyond the ‘material disorder’ of the ‘biological disabled’ body.
This type of methodological engagement has not been easy. As a crip theorist, I
have been compelled to find a way of reading texts/discourses for what it refuses to
include (see Irigaray, 1985). Butler (1993: 37) highlights how difficult this is: ‘[f]or
how can one read a text for what does not appear within its own terms, but which
nevertheless constitutes the illegible conditions of its own legibility?’. Seeking to
expose ableism within incest discourse(s) highlights the invisible character and
power that ableism possesses. Ableism is a form of normative violence that makes
abledness compulsory and leads to the abjection of disabled bodies. To ‘crip incest’
is not to suggest that we should all start engaging in incestuous practices (but that

13
Cripping Incest Discourse(s)

wouldn’t bother me). Rather, it is to illustrate the myriad ways in which ableism
seeps into so many discourses and practices without us even (overtly) recognising
it. This is also a form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1991), a violence that creates
material effects without us recognising it. Part of crip and cripping is about exposing
ableism, just as queer theory works to expose and subvert heteronormativity (and
indeed, Butler does this in her problematisation of incest). This postconventional
approach is also a deliberate exercise of refusing totalising accounts and answers,
and of yielding to the necessity of disturbing our ways of thinking, being, and doing
(Butler, 1993; Price & Shildrick, 1998).
Yet, as much as I would like to remain focused on the theoretical propositions
raised in my analysis, it is perhaps worth considering the ethico-political dimensions
of these arguments. Certain consequences flow from cripping incest and the sugges-
tion that the prohibition of incest is ableist—particularly when we understand the
ethically injurious nature of ableism. Engaging in this dialogue would avoid empty
theorising and instead open ‘material effects for embodied subjects’ (Price & Shil-
drick, 1998: 243). But what are those material effects?
Scholars have begun to trace the contours between crip and queer theory in the
aim of forging alliances between these two abjected groups (see: Kafer, 2013; Ram-
low, 2016; Sandahl, 2003). To that end, an engagement with the social and anti-
social turns in queer theory might provide one avenue to think through the material
effects of cripping incest discourse(s) and crip futures. Rather than get bogged down
in a discussion about the possibility of future incestuous practices and the mate-
rial effects of it, we could instead follow Edelman’s (2004) approach of ‘fucking
the future’. Edelman (2004: 11) suggests that any conception of the future is inter-
twined with the figure of ‘the Child’, and as such, they are ‘the telos of the social
order’. Edelman (2004) argues that the figure of ‘the Child’ is mobilised to bolster
heteronormativity, and that queer people are produced by society as a grave threat to
reproductive futurism and ‘the Child’. The proponents and opponents of marriage
equality, for example, both mobilised ‘our children’s future’ as their key matter of
concern. According to such ‘logic’, marriage equality is not about equality or justice
or desire or agency, but rather, about the future of (our) children (Kafer, 2013). Edel-
man suggests that ‘queerness names the side of those not “fighting for the children,”
the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value
of reproductive futurism’ (2004: 3, italics in original). What, then, is Edelman’s
response to this social constitution? He writes:
[f]uck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terror-
ized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on
the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network
of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop (Edelman, 2004:
29).
For Edelman (2004), a focus on reproductive futurity singularly forecloses all
other possibilities and forms of social arrangement. A focus on reproductive futur-
ism positions queer people and queerness as a threat to the social order, and as such,
there can be no future for queer(s).

13
 R. Thorneycroft

Edelman’s (2004) account can also be used to illustrate the bolstering of abled
heteronormativity. Kafer (2013: 2–3) writes:
any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future,
in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed, it
is the very absence of disability that signals this better future. The presence of
disability, then, signals something else: a future that bears too many traces of
the ills of the present to be desirable. In this framework, a future with disabil-
ity is a future no one wants, and the figure of the disabled person, especially
the disabled fetus or child, becomes the symbol of this undesired future.
Incest also works here as a perfect example. Incestuous practice is understood as
a threat to the future, and as such, the prohibition of incest makes abledness—and
heterosexuality, according to Butler (1990) and Rubin (1975)—compulsory:
sites of reproductive futurity demand a Child that both resembles the parents
and exceeds them; “we” all want “our” children to be more healthy, more
active, stronger and smarter than we are, and we are supposed to do every-
thing in our power to make that happen. The Child through whom legacies are
passed down is, without doubt, able-bodied/able-minded (Kafer, 2013: 29).
Futurity is violent and dangerous to crip and queer bodies. As such, saying ‘fuck
the future’ can appear as the only viable crip/queer response (Kafer, 2013).
Yet as I contemplate fucking the future there is a sense in which such a position
feels too dystopic. Muñoz’ (2019) work provides the necessary rejoinder to Edel-
man, and while he focuses on queer, I think his comments can also be tied to crip
specifically.5 Muñoz’ (2019) futurity project is clearly more utopian; he writes:
[q]ueerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are
not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm
illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer,
yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and
used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain (Muñoz, 2019: 1).
If queerness is not yet here, and to which it is something we have to look forward
to, then surely the best is yet to come. According to Muñoz (2019), we have only
seen partial snippets of queerness’s radical and transformative power. Muñoz (2019)
challenges us to hold out hope for a queer future, and if that is to be so, then we need
not be so troubled by the prospects of crip and incest. This is the case because dif-
ferent futures and different ways of living, being, and doing will avail themselves.
Remember, too, that large portions of our lives are dictated by a naturalised form of
straight/heteronormative time; queer and crip time will open up more temporospati-
alities, avenues, possibilities, and futures (Kafer, 2013; Muñoz, 2019).

5
  Muñoz (2019: 182) notes the connection too.

13
Cripping Incest Discourse(s)

Incestuous practices might also not be understood as that unusual/unnatural

once we put into context how people choose and un-choose disabledness every day
(Clare, 2017). In the context of un-choosing, Clare (2017: 129) writes:
[c]ollectively in the white Western world, we go to such lengths to un-choose
disability. We wear seat belts. We don’t dive into shallow water. We vaccinate
against polio and measles. Certainly these actions are about avoiding death,
but our avoidance quickly mashes into the un-choosing of disability.
The prohibition of incest is another example (presuming, for a moment, we are
imagining heterosexual abled subjects). Aligning with our neoliberal individualist
selves, humans are invested in choosing how, when, where, and if, disabledness pre-
sents in our lives (Clare, 2017). And there are certainly moments when such deci-
sions are made. A prospective adoptive parent might request a disabled child, preg-
nant people may keep their foetus despite the ‘risk’/prediction of Down Syndrome
(and indeed, many pregnant people choose not to get such tests at all), deaf people
using ‘artificial’ insemination for pregnancy may request a deaf sperm donor, and
transabled people have a desire to become disabled (Clare, 2017). Suddenly incestu-
ous practices don’t seem that unusual at all.
Clare (2017: 130) writes that ‘how the world treats people who, in some fash-
ion, choose disability reveals so much’. Choosing disabledness results in reactions
of disgust, shock, horror and disbelief, attitudes of hatred and irresponsibility, and
practices of stigma, marginalisation, and violence (Clare, 2017). The incest taboo
is an example of a strategy that works to ensure the unchoosing of disabledness.
Even further, the power of the incest taboo suggests choosing and unchoosing are
not even options; there is no choice at all when it comes to incest (Warner, 1999).
Conversely, unchoosing is ‘celebrated and framed as a collective imperative’ (Clare,
2017: 130). The unchoosing of disabledness—in whatever form it takes—is part of a
politics that works to create and perpetuate monocultures (of abledness). We cannot
select which examples of choosing and unchoosing (dis/abledness) we should fight
for; rather, we must fight against the creation of monocultures in all their forms and
guises.

Reflections and Possibilities

For those invested in crip theory and politics, we must remember that we are
invested in conceptualising a more efficacious account of disability and crip. Disa-
bled bodies and lives are not less than; they are not (reductively) sick or weak or
broken or deformed or crazy or vulnerable or any other pathologised term, word, or
account. As Goodley et al. (2019: 973) assert, disability ‘is not a flaw, an individual
tragedy nor a whispered recognition of another’s embodied failing or a shameful
family truth’. Disabled bodies, like all bodies, are changeable, unruly, revisable, and
imperfect—and that is brilliant/fabulous/crip (Clare, 2017). And we must always
remember that it is not disabled people that have problems–although many of us
do given our human condition–but rather ableist society that fucks (over) disabled

13
 R. Thorneycroft

people. Ableism compounds injustice and oppression, and as Davis (2006: 3) argues,
the gaze must be switched to consider the ways in which ‘normalcy is constructed
to create the “problem” of the disabled person’. In this context, then, the prospect of
creating or producing disabledness is not a bad thing. Whether through incest or the
rejection of pre-natal testing, for example, producing disability holds out hope for a
crip future. Disability, according to Goodley et al. (2019: 988), ‘is a place of oppres-
sion but also possibility’. If disabled bodies are not broken or sick or injured or prob-
lematic, then it does not matter if incestuous practices eventuate.
Kafer (2013: 28) tells us that ‘the futures we imagine reveal the biases of the
present’. Imagining incest, or imagining a world without the incest taboo, reveals
the biases of today that prohibit its enactment. But the disciplinary norms of
today cannot continue into the future; Goodley (2014: 135) writes:
[p]erhaps now is the time for us all to move out of our normative shadows
and embrace our inherent potential to be non-normative. Perhaps now is
time for a politics of abnormality (Goodley, 2014: 135).
A politics of abnormality must entail the rejection of monocultures and all that
that entails. A monoculture can only exist through damage; damaging all that is
‘other’ to preserve sameness. Sameness is violence, it is evidence of violence
against the ‘other’.
This essay has charted incest discourse(s) and exposed their ableist presup-
positions. As a theoretical exercise, cripping incest discourse(s) reveals ableist
ways of thinking, being, and doing. It also reveals a set of rules and frameworks
that work to regulate people in particular ways, and thus dictates what the future
should look like. The incest taboo also reflects the ways in which particular sex-
ual practices are legitimate while others are negated and disavowed. Rubin (1984:
306) writes:
economic sanctions, family pressures, erotic stigma, social discrimination,
negative ideology, and the paucity of information about erotic behaviour, all
serve to make it difficult for people to make unconventional sexual choices.
There certainly are structural constraints that impede free sexual choice, but
they hardly operate to coerce anyone into being a pervert. On the contrary,
they operate to coerce everyone towards normality.
The rules of sexuality and sexual practices work to regulate and coerce people
into being normative subjects. Subscribing to the incest taboo reinstantiates abled/
ableist and heteronormative family structures. Is this what we want? Can we live
in a world where the forces continue to try to eliminate crip and queerness? Do we
want to live in a world where all forms of non-normativity are attacked? While my
example/explication of incestuous practices may not properly ‘do justice’ to the spe-
cificities and implications of future incestuous practices, I think it does introduce
us to sets of questions about ableist (and heteronormative) thinking. Whether or not
we believe in incestuous practices, it is important to think through the underlying
discourses and practices through which dis/ability is constituted in its prohibition,
as well as the ways in which non-normative subject positions are discouraged and

13
Cripping Incest Discourse(s)

delegitimised. Ultimately, the challenge is to think through and around these prac-
tices in trying to fashion efficacious crip (and queer) futures.

Funding  No funding was provided for the research or writing of this manuscript.

Declarations 

Conflict of interest  The author declares that he/she has no conflict of interest.

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