In her 2004 book Undoing Gender, she wrote, “It is not necessary to figure parent-child incest as a unilateral impingement on the child by the parent, since whatever impingement takes place will also be registered within the sphere of fantasy. In fact, to understand the violation that incest can be--and also to distinguish between those occasions of incest that are violation and those that are not--it is unnecessary to figure the body of the child exclusively as a surface imposed upon from the outside.”[1]
She also wrote, “The reification of the child’s body as passive surface would thus constitute, at a theoretical level, a further deprivation of the child: the deprivation of psychic life.”[2]
“So I keep adding this qualification: ‘when incest is a violation,’ suggesting that I think that there may be occasions in which it is not. Why would I talk that way? Well, I do think that there are probably forms of incest that are not necessarily traumatic or which gain their traumatic character by virtue of the consciousness of social shame that they produce.”[3]
“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.”[4]
[1] Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 155.
[2] Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 155.
[3] Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 157.
[4] Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 160.