“Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.” — Henry Miller
Taboo is a shifting shoreline. The boundary between public discourse and private knowledge drifts with the tides of its cultural context–but who holds the power to define these boundaries? When and why should they be crossed? The essays in this section examine the significance of breaking taboos in order to dispel shame, to empower truth-telling, and to wedge the cultural dialogue ever wider in pursuit of universal truths about the human experience.
In “Oh, How Hack! Oh, How Unnerving!: Subverting the Double Taboo of Menstruation in Stand-Up Comedy,” Kathy Cacace examines the taboo of menstruation in both American popular discourse and stand-up comedy in order to understand the powerful political work of three contemporary female comics. In “Sticks and Stones: The Effects of Relational Identity on Commercially Sexually Exploited Children,” Yael Rosenstock reveals a gap in the research on commercially sexually exploited children’s (CSEC) experiences with regard to questions of social identity and self-perception, questioning the taboo nature of the subject. In particular, she is interested in the role of self-esteem, others’ opinions and the lack of representation of first-person narratives. In “Rousseau’s Notion of the Confessional Sphere: From the Confinement of the Family and the Catholic Church to the National Public Sphere,” John Varacalli argues that Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that the confessional sphere should not just be confined to the family and Catholic Church but also expanded to the state, or public sphere, as well. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions, ‘overshared,’ or revealed shocking and intimate details about his life to others, because he believed that humanity can function better in a social environment in which open communication of any sort in any sphere was permissible.
