Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity
Checking Availibility...Description
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.
About this Author
R. Danielle Egan is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. Her bookDancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: Exotic Dancers and their Regular Customers (2006) was also with Palgrave Macmillan. She co-editedFlesh 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 ofA Sociology of Sex and Sexuality (1996) and Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture (2004), and co-editor ofPerspectives 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.
Reviews
"Though we have been in the grips of a kind of high-voltage paralysis on the subject of sexualizing children for at least half a century, this book is really the first to provide not only a broad-ranging analysis and history, but a reasoned and humane way out of it. It is a powerful and highly significant work that should generate wide discussion and pointed action."--James R Kincaid, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, University of Southern California; author ofChild-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian CultureandErotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting
"This timely and thought-provoking book locates anxieties about children and sexuality in historical perspective, prompting us to question the 'sexualization phobia' that has become such a pervasive feature of debates on childhood in contemporary western societies."--Stevi Jackson, Professor of Sociology and Director of The Centre for Women's Studies, The University of York, UK; author ofChildhood and Sexuality,Heterosexuality in Question; co-author ofTheorizing Sexuality
"More than a history of ideas between 1840 and 1940, this book is also, importantly, a history of the present. Not only does it illuminate historical specificitiesand continuities in thinking about child sexuality, it also critically intervenes in contemporary debates by connecting the figure of the sexual child to the politics of recognition."--Steven Angelides, Monash Fellow, Centre for Women's Studies & Gender Research/Sociology, Monash University, Australia; author ofThe History of Bisexuality
If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.
