Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America

Brian Connolly, University of South Florida

Why did the emergence of the liberal subject in the nineteenth-century United States occasion a crisis in and reconstitution of the incest prohibition? How did the nuclear family become normative as a result of this moment in the history of incest?  This talk will address these questions in the realms of law, reproduction, and anthropology.