Intersectionality without age? Reading the incestuous rape of Lot's Daughters within incest culture

Mbani, Amata
(2026) European Association of Biblical Studies (Session name: Intersectional Criticism: Gender, Class, Race, Sexuality, and Disability) — Location: Leuven, Belgium (20.July.2026)

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The story of the incestuous rape of Lot’s Daughters in Gn 19:30-38 has all the ingredients of a “text of terror”: chemical submission, gang rape and a father daughter incest seemingly supported by the authorities of the text who remain completely silent. In just a few verses, this short story breaks two taboos. Not only does the narrative breaks the taboo of incest, considered as the “fundamental taboo”, it also breaks what has been termed the “ultimate taboo”, that is: female incestuous violence. Indeed, in the biblical account the sexual assault is initiated and orchestrated by the two female protagonists against their unconscious father. I argue that interpreting an incest narrative requires a relation, critical and political analysis of age which the feminist or gender-conscious scholarship on the text fails to do. Does gender act as a blindfold for age obscuring the adult-child power relation in the biblical incest narrative? I answer this question by looking at the reception history of the text within contemporary culture and at how it reveals the dangers of a lack of an explicit intersectional approach that centers the adult-child power relations as much as the gender power relations. Then, contemporary works on childism and the concept of "incest culture" are brought to the front to reflect both on the importance of the intersection of age and gender in incestuous situations and on our positionality as adult researchers faced with a text involving children and young people.
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Mbani, A. (2026, July 23). Intersectionality without age? Reading the incestuous rape of Lot’s Daughters within incest culture. European Association of Biblical Studies (Session name: Intersectional Criticism: Gender, Class, Race, Sexuality, and Disability), Leuven, Belgium. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/279187