Abstract

El s Kathryn Harrison points out, one of America's most popular misconceptions, especially in the white middle-class family, is that father-daughter incest is a rare occurrence. The crime of incest often goes unreported and unpunished in part because of a silence around it. While exact figures are hard to pin down, current data suggest that anywhere from one in four to one in three girls experiences sexual abuse at the hands of fathers or surrogate fathers. In the 1980s scholars such asJudith Herman and Diana Russell provided data that suggested incest was at least as prevalent in white middleand upper-middleclass homes as it was elsewhere.2 Far from confirming that incest only happens in certain homes, this research suggests that the sexual abuse of daughters is a ubiquitous practice that cuts across racial and class lines. Nonetheless, familiar narratives of incest construct the white middle-class family as a nurturing unit in which the rapacious father is an impossible character. In particular, these narratives often relegate incest to the homes of cultural others or attempt to dismiss a daughter's first-person account of sexual violation as fantasy (Doane and Hodges 2; Wilson). In 1997, Kathryn Harrison published her controversial memoir about fatherdaughter incest, The Kiss, a book that disturbed the silence around and as-