Teaching Rape and Incest

Elizabeth Breau has a PhD in English Literature and is trying to get her career started after having two children and being away from academia for seven years. She is currently working on a book about representations of rape and incest in fiction by white and African American women. This project draws on multiple feminist perspectives to explore topics including sado-masochistic pornography and the eroticization of victimization, incest as the central intersection of patriarchy, Western religion and capitalism in African-American women's literature, and how abuse survivors raise their own children. Since this project is both intellectually and personally demanding (I plan to read the Story of O and explore violent sado-masochistic porn in print and on the web), I am in search of a plucky group of feminists who can stomach the grossest stuff male supremacist culture has to offer so we can dissect it right down to its rotten core.