Sibling Incest Class Offered at University of Missouri? [View all]

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The University of Missouri is offering a class on sibling incest this spring semester! Conservative heads are exploding across the country, but is there value to studying the theory of and writings about incest?

Huffington Post reports:

The conservative blog Campus Reform reports the class is taught in hour-long sessions twice each week. The College Fix, another conservative blog, called the class "a ridiculous compilation of academic gobbledygook that ultimately seeks to defend and normalize incest as commonplace and acceptable."

Also quotes the professor, Stefani Engelstein:

My class, “Sibling Incest in Theory and Literature” is a humanities course. In the humanities, we investigate the relationships between ideas that arise in the history of human thought in order to better understand complex issues, past and present. There are many different disciplines that have asked where incest taboos come from and how they function. Some examples are anthropology, psychoanalysis, and evolutionary psychology, and we will look at how each approaches the question. Erotically charged sibling relationships also appear in many narratives, including myths and legends, but also European literature particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The course asks why there was an increase in incest narratives in this period. Literature provides a way for people to pose questions about how society evaluates different kinds of relationships and identities, so our readings focus on discovering what social, political, and scientific issues are connected to this topic and why.