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Sibling Incest Class Offered at University of Missouri?
The University of Missouri is offering a class on sibling incest this spring semester! Conservative heads are exploding across the country, but is there value to studying the theory of and writings about incest?
Huffington Post reports:
The conservative blog Campus Reform reports the class is taught in hour-long sessions twice each week. The College Fix, another conservative blog, called the class "a ridiculous compilation of academic gobbledygook that ultimately seeks to defend and normalize incest as commonplace and acceptable."
Also quotes the professor, Stefani Engelstein:
My class, “Sibling Incest in Theory and Literature” is a humanities course. In the humanities, we investigate the relationships between ideas that arise in the history of human thought in order to better understand complex issues, past and present. There are many different disciplines that have asked where incest taboos come from and how they function. Some examples are anthropology, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology, and we will look at how each approaches the question. Erotically charged sibling relationships also appear in many narratives, including myths and legends, but also European literature particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The course asks why there was an increase in incest narratives in this period. Literature provides a way for people to pose questions about how society evaluates different kinds of relationships and identities, so our readings focus on discovering what social, political, and scientific issues are connected to this topic and why.
31 replies
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As someone who met their husband in "Philosophy of Sex, Love and Friendship" I can assure everyone that this class is not a how to for incest.
Wisdom says the class syllabus includes a lot of reading and essays.
I majored in finance. Always thought a "Prostitution of Money Markets, the World's Oldest Profession" would be a great class!
https://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/bookshelf.aspx?name=all-in-the-family&content=true
In 1871, a short skit in the humor magazine Punch titled “Most Natural Selection” proclaimed that “If Mr. Darwin’s theory of the Descent of Man were true, we should . . . have to accept quite new views of marriage.” Insisting that it was preferable that married couples should not be near relations, such as cousins, the skit claimed that “if we are descended from Anthropoid Apes . . . we should conclude that there was no cause or just impediment whatever why we should not marry cousins so very many more degrees removed than any other as those arboreal and quadrumanous ones.” Punch’s characteristically facetious contribution to the famous debates over evolution in Victorian Britain undoubtedly shocked many readers with its grotesque and disquieting insinuations regarding conjugal relations between humans and simians. But Charles Darwin himself, who had pronounced himself reconciled to man’s bestial ancestry in his earliest notebooks, would more likely have been discomfited by what the skit suggested about cousin marriage, for in 1839 he had married Emma Wedgwood, a woman who was both his first cousin and his sister-in-law.
Josiah Wedgwood married a cousin, but his children did not: His sons took a step up socially by marrying into the wealthy Allen family, and his daughter Susannah married Robert Darwin, the son of Josiah’s close friend Erasmus Darwin. In the next generation, Caroline Darwin married her cousin Joe Wedgwood. It was an alliance that made good financial sense, since her father, Robert, who was a private banker as well as a physician, had lent a lot of money to Joe’s father, “Jos”; the marriage would keep important debts within the family. Caroline’s brother Charles Darwin later married Joe’s sister Emma, reinforcing the alliance.
Persistent intermarriage between members of Darwin’s family and the Wedgwood clan effectively intertwined two bourgeois dynasties of the English Midlands. A plethora of biographical studies of the great evolutionist and the ongoing publication of his correspondence have revealed the particularities of this complex family network in great detail, with the result that more is perhaps known about Darwin’s extended family than that of any comparable figure (with the obvious exception of royalty). In Incest and Influence, an illuminating study of the significance of cousin marriages for the 19th-century English bourgeoisie, Adam Kuper therefore uses Darwin as an exemplar of a more general tendency.
The book opens with an account of Darwin’s protracted deliberation over whether and whom to marry. His choice of a close relation as his spouse was, as Kuper makes clear, entirely unexceptional for a man of his social position in England at that time: In the Victorian upper middle classes, more than 1 marriage in 10 was between first or second cousins. A similar number of marriages were between brothers- and sisters-in-law, meaning that about 1 person in 5 married within the family circle. This emphasis on endogamy was an effective means for bourgeois families like the Darwin-Wedgwoods to sustain beneficial domestic connections and to safeguard the property and riches accrued from the nascent industrial economy. Great intermarried families therefore came to dominate trades such as ceramics (the Wedgwood family’s pottery was world famous) and banking (the largest bank in the world, the House of Rothschild, was a family firm, and many Quaker banking families, including the Barclays and the Gurneys, intermarried and eventually merged their banks).
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In 1871, a short skit in the humor magazine Punch titled “Most Natural Selection” proclaimed that “If Mr. Darwin’s theory of the Descent of Man were true, we should . . . have to accept quite new views of marriage.” Insisting that it was preferable that married couples should not be near relations, such as cousins, the skit claimed that “if we are descended from Anthropoid Apes . . . we should conclude that there was no cause or just impediment whatever why we should not marry cousins so very many more degrees removed than any other as those arboreal and quadrumanous ones.” Punch’s characteristically facetious contribution to the famous debates over evolution in Victorian Britain undoubtedly shocked many readers with its grotesque and disquieting insinuations regarding conjugal relations between humans and simians. But Charles Darwin himself, who had pronounced himself reconciled to man’s bestial ancestry in his earliest notebooks, would more likely have been discomfited by what the skit suggested about cousin marriage, for in 1839 he had married Emma Wedgwood, a woman who was both his first cousin and his sister-in-law.
Josiah Wedgwood married a cousin, but his children did not: His sons took a step up socially by marrying into the wealthy Allen family, and his daughter Susannah married Robert Darwin, the son of Josiah’s close friend Erasmus Darwin. In the next generation, Caroline Darwin married her cousin Joe Wedgwood. It was an alliance that made good financial sense, since her father, Robert, who was a private banker as well as a physician, had lent a lot of money to Joe’s father, “Jos”; the marriage would keep important debts within the family. Caroline’s brother Charles Darwin later married Joe’s sister Emma, reinforcing the alliance.
Persistent intermarriage between members of Darwin’s family and the Wedgwood clan effectively intertwined two bourgeois dynasties of the English Midlands. A plethora of biographical studies of the great evolutionist and the ongoing publication of his correspondence have revealed the particularities of this complex family network in great detail, with the result that more is perhaps known about Darwin’s extended family than that of any comparable figure (with the obvious exception of royalty). In Incest and Influence, an illuminating study of the significance of cousin marriages for the 19th-century English bourgeoisie, Adam Kuper therefore uses Darwin as an exemplar of a more general tendency.
The book opens with an account of Darwin’s protracted deliberation over whether and whom to marry. His choice of a close relation as his spouse was, as Kuper makes clear, entirely unexceptional for a man of his social position in England at that time: In the Victorian upper middle classes, more than 1 marriage in 10 was between first or second cousins. A similar number of marriages were between brothers- and sisters-in-law, meaning that about 1 person in 5 married within the family circle. This emphasis on endogamy was an effective means for bourgeois families like the Darwin-Wedgwoods to sustain beneficial domestic connections and to safeguard the property and riches accrued from the nascent industrial economy. Great intermarried families therefore came to dominate trades such as ceramics (the Wedgwood family’s pottery was world famous) and banking (the largest bank in the world, the House of Rothschild, was a family firm, and many Quaker banking families, including the Barclays and the Gurneys, intermarried and eventually merged their banks).
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