More than just kissing: cousins and the changing status of family

Jenny DiPlacidi is the author of the 2018 book "Gothic incest: Gender, sexuality and transgression". Chapter 4 is called "More than just kissing: cousins and the changing status of family". JSTOR has a digital copy of the book. Here is an excerpt:

Amongst the many tangled familial relationships in the Gothic that are fraught with incestuous desires and passions, cousin relationships occupy a curious space in which the incestuous nature of the bond is at once diminished and heightened by its relative acceptance by both English society and the law. Cousin marriages may be more permissible than other relationships between blood kin because the consanguineal tie, in terms of shared genetic material, is weaker than those between the more taboo incestuous relationships, such as mother-son, father-daughter or brother-sister. The difficulty in coming to a clear consensus regarding the incestuous nature of cousin marriage is demonstrated by the irreconcilable differences between leading scientists and anthropologists on cousin incest. Sociobiologist Joseph Shepher argues that 'most cultural forms of mating', including preferential cousin marriages, 'represent cultural regulations aimed at optimum inbreeding'. Shepher defines incest as 'mating between relatives, called inbreeding' and that 'as a technical term, inbreeding is reserved for cases in which discernible traces can be followed back to common ancestors within two to three generations'. Certainly cousins count in this regard, their shared relations being grandparents.