Nick Haramis
April 28, 2008
Much to my family's chagrin, I've always been sort of obsessed with incest. I read JT Leroy's The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things with great excitement! What an exciting coming-of-age odyssey! I watched Spanking the Monkey and The House of Yes, reveling in family ties bound too tightly. I even flipped through the Dollanganger melodramas churned out by V.C. Andrews, surreptitiously of course, because twincest was of a different breed altogether. When, in university, I was forced to decide on a topic for my undergraduate thesis, my choice was obvious. Over the course of many months, I examined the ways in which incest was used in popular culture to explore notions of sameness and difference. Sylvia Plath and Jacques Lacan held it all together. It was also interesting that mom-on-son action and its variants often came about as reactions to a fear of difference in the outside world: homosexuality, miscegenation. Aspirations of academia aside, people were really creeped out. Still, I persevered with my research—until Julianne Moore came along and ruined everything.
