Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity

by Egan, R. Danielle; Hawkes, Gail

• ISBN13: 9781403972576
• ISBN10: 1403972575
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This ground-breaking work provides the first history of ideas about the sexual child in modernity. Beginning with twenty-first century panics about sexualization, the authors address why the sexual child excites such powerful emotions in the Anglophone west. Historical analysis of the past two centuries offers some challenging and insightful answers. Drawing on a wide range of different materials from enlightenment philosophy, medicine, social purity sexual hygiene, psychoanalysis and child development, this book illustrates that current panics have a consistent and fascinating history. Egan and Hawkes strive to progress beyond the current impasse of fear and anxiety.

Author Biography

R. Danielle Egan is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Her book Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: Exotic Dancers and their Regular Customers (2006) was also with Palgrave Macmillan. She co-edited Flesh for Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance (2006) with Katherine Frank and Merri Lisa Johnson.

Gail Hawkes teaches sociology at the University of New England, Australia. She has been teaching and writing about sexuality since 1992 in the UK and in Australia. She is the author of A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality (1996) and Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture (2004), and co-editor of Perspectives in Human Sexuality (2005). This project has been her delight and her burden for four years and represents in many ways the synthesis of her intellectual interest and training.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: Back to the Future	p. 1
Constructing the Modern Sexual Child	p. 13
The Sexual Child and the Social Purity Movement	p. 33
Sexual Hygiene and the Habituation of Childhood Sexuality	p. 51
Sexology and the New Normality	p. 75
Freud and the Cartography of Infantile Sexuality	p. 97
Developing the Sexual Child	p. 125
Concluding Thoughts and Potentials for Future Thinking	p. 147
Notes	p. 157
Bibliography	p. 171
Index	p. 185
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