Relative Lust: Accidental Incest’s Affective and Legal Resonances

This article explores the intimate relationship between the body, sexuality, technology, popular culture, and incest law. I examine the nature, meaning, and affective resonances of representations of consensual incest, “accidental incest,” and “technology facilitated accidental incest” in popular culture, pornography, and public service announcements. Drawing on a pastiche of affect theory; cultural and media studies theories of human-technological relations; queer, feminist and cultural posthumanist theories of embodiment, subjectivity and sexuality; and, Eve Sedgwick’s notion of a “reparative reading” I consider how these experiences and representations expand our emotional and erotic desires and alter our perceptions of our bodies’ parameters, their “proper” sexual objects and kinship relations, and their boundary violations. I argue that these affective residues pose a challenge to the “logic” underpinning the taboo’s intransigence, thus potentially contributing to the destigmatization and decriminalization of consensual adult incestuous relations.