One of the very first scenes in the series Game Of Thrones (HBO), reputedly the most popular in the history of television, shows the sexual relationship between Queen Cersei Lannister and her twin brother Jaime. The three royal children attributed to King Robert Baratheon were born of this incestuous union. The discovery of the terrible secret by the young Bran Stark triggers cataclysmic events that occupy the volumes of the literary saga A Song of Ice and Fire, by George RR Martin, and its television derivatives.
It’s not just there. Incest is also present in the series Rome, The Tudors Where The Borgias. He is almost always represented as natural, innocent, without domination and therefore without culprit or victim. The leitmotif permeates the cinema, from Heart murmur at Margaret and Julian. Even the series Star Wars dared to venture into this sulphurous terrain. Porn platforms have developed a very popular genre around family categories like “ stepmom », milf Where ” daddy »…
“The incest which is most common in our society, that between a father (or a paternal figure) and his daughter, is almost absent from TV series, whereas Adelphic incest, between a brother and a sister, is overrepresented”, says Iris Brey, doctor in cinematographic studies, who has just co-edited with Juliet Drouar the collective work The culture of incest (Threshold). She was interviewed while she was in Paris.
“In the culture, incest is not described as sexual violence, but as an erotic practice made to titillate. Also, since the movie Lolita, of Stanley Kubrick, the responsibility for triggering the incestuous practice is placed on the young girl, not on the aggressor. All our messages are scrambled, ”explains Iris Brey.
The darkened subject is dealt with in the book, which traces its title to the formula of the culture of rape. In both cases, the fundamental idea is to think of sexual violence in cultural rather than individual terms, in order to finally recall the tolerance, even the encouragement of such practices.
“What seemed obvious to me is that there are a lot of stereotypes around incestuous sexual violence, as there are a lot around rape, adds Mme Brey. For a very long time, the image of rape was that of a stranger attacking a woman in an alley. And then, the statistics showed that it was mainly men who were part of the entourage of the victims. Similarly, for a very long time, incest was presented as forbidden, taboo. In fact, when I saw the figures, I understood that we can no longer think about it in this way, like a taboo, since it affects almost everyone. »
The problem directly concerns one in ten people in France, according to the statistics quoted in the book (ie 6.7 million victims), and as a matter of fact, most violence against children occurs at home. “Incest is everywhere. If it were so taboo, we would not be so many and numerous as victims, says the author. What is taboo is not doing it, but talking about it. As a result, I wanted us to think about several, from several disciplinary points of view to understand how we could have arrived at such a scourge, why it is so possible to incest. »
The anthropology of men
A complete chapter is devoted to this postulate of the “universal taboo”, the “fundamental prohibition” defended by the anthropologists Claude Lévy-Strauss and Maurice Godelier. For Dorothée Dussy, contributor to the book, these notions represent “an active and constant denial of real situations”.
Obviously, if the rules universally shared in human cultures prohibit incestuous marriages, they do not prevent the incestuous rapes of the children born of these unions. Incest thus becomes the cradle of domination. “The aggressors do it because they can do it and they can help themselves because the bodies of women and children are at the service of those who dominate”, summarizes Mme Brey.
Society reacts all the same in relation to all sexual violence, including that done to children by their fathers. #MeToo, publicized denunciations, documentaries, special courts: there is movement. Mme Brey recalls, however, that in France, only one sexual assault in a hundred ends up in the assizes.
“I wouldn’t say that I see any real changes on the institutional side. On the other hand, I emphasize that for any social movement for change, words are first needed to talk about it. Words offer the first weapon to become aware of a problem. »
What is staged
Hence the importance of incest in culture, not to titillate the taboo and “glamorize” it as in so many series and films, but to denounce it as certain plays do (Fire, de Mouawad) and several books written more or less recently. It’s not just RR Martin on the shelves…
Cormac McCarthy addressed the abominable theme in The darkness outside, his second book published in 1968. The novel follows an incestuous couple, brother and sister, Culla and Rinthy Holme, who have given birth. Incest is described there as the supreme sin generating new serious faults. Christine Angot has been transforming her victim traumas into literary material since 1999. The story of Camille Kouchner The big family (2021), sold more than 300,000 copies, has made it possible to understand that this pedocrime exists in all walks of life.
“What is interesting is that literature is the place that requires the least money to produce, comments Mme Brey. The more there are financial issues, the less there is critical speech on these issues. »
She also observes that the series and the cinema often reproduce visual and script codes. Iris Brey posted The female gaze (2020), which is about how to film women without turning them into objects.
“It’s very important to think about what you’re staging so as not to reproduce patterns of domination. How are bodies filmed? From what point of view? To tell what? […] I am not calling for censorship. I want an awareness of the images that surround us, which eroticize the violence against children and women. »