[3x01 - Gabistat Incest Analysis]
One of the things that I always fucking love about incest as a motif is that the whole point of it is turning something that should be familiar and safe into something familiar yet unsafe. This generally a good way to apporach how incest works in Gothic, and doesn't apply to every situation, but it is how Gabistat is being set up to work.
Lestat is clearly having a Moment. He is attempting to cling to familiarity and things that he knows. Music, sex, drowning everything out. Daniel is putting pressure on this veneer ("Did you stutter as a child" isn't just asking the obvious question, it's pressing specifically on covered up vulnerability. This will probably be one of the themes of the season), and Lestat is being exposed to facts he isn't ready to face, so he turns toward something familiar and safe for reassurance.
A mother is supposed to be safe and familiar. Running to your mother for help is pretty common experience, but what if that mother isn't safe? She is familiar, she will bandage the wounds on your face and kiss your bruises better, but she is not SAFE.
In Jenny DiPlacidi's chapter on "Queer mothers: female sexual agency and male victims," there is something noted that I think is fascinating.
"Locating the socially prescribed gender ideologies that render mother-son incest unlikely as being biologically grounded or natural exposes the same understandings of mother-son incest that have underpinned both literary representations of and scholarly discourse on the topic. That research across a range of fields suggests there are links between positions of power, non-maternal instincts, and dangerous promiscuity illuminated the sociopolitical investment in maintaining the myth of biologically determined gender ideologies." (pg. 247)
So Lestat's clinging and reaching for his mother is disrupting the cultural requirement that Lestat is Dominant, because he is conceding power over himself and handing it to the one person he thinks he can be vulnerable with safely, Gabrielle. In this case, Gabrielle healing his cheek with her own blood.
Watching her face change here is fascinating, because she is not letting down whatever emotion is on her face there (we don't have enough of a baseline. I think it's digust, or maybe irritation in that first gif? Either way, NOT a positive and open emotion) until after she heals him herself. Her stone-walling texts with Lestat are definitely indicating her more aloof personality, so I'm really excited to see how they flesh out her relationship with her desires.
"If we replace the intolerance of queerness with the intolerance of incest, another sexuality that falls outside of the normative constructs, we can see how Bersani's point about anxieties regarding power relationships applies here...This type of incest, like homosexuality in Bersani's terms, reveals through it's social production of intolerance similarly profound anxieties about power and social relations. What appeals to me about Bersani's use of Foucault to shape an understanding of the social intolerance of homosexuality and my desire to apply it to incest intolerance (read: social revulsion) - particularly incest of the mother-son variety - is that it speaks to my overall argument regarding power relations in the Gothic. For if, as Bersani states, there are connections between 'the way we take our pleasure and the way we exercise power' then there much certainly be something seriously destabilizing to traditional power relationships - sexual and political - in the mere idea of mother-son sex (250- 251)"
Since this entire episode has be an act on resisting vulnerability and putting up a campy, pretentious, and bratty front, ending it with Gabrielle is the perfect show that Lestat is willing to submit to being vulnerable now, and that is going to spell trouble for him. It also is going to be, potentially (with all the conversations around pronouns and gender identity in this singular episode) challenging gender norms and biological identity.
Oh, the power of our unholy mothers 🥰
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