Danielle Egan

Professor R. Danielle Egan joined the faculty at St. Lawrence University in 2000. She regularly teaches courses on Sexuality and Culture, Gender and Feminist Theory, Making Sexualities, Postcolonial Feminist Theory and Desire, Drive and the Self. Her classes draw on literature, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history and art to help unravel the, often thorny, topic of gender and sexuality. A strong believer in the importance of multiple ways of knowing, students in Danielle’s classes write papers, engage in group discussions, use iMovie and work together to make social change happen here at SLU. Her research examines the social construction of sexual “problems.” She is fascinated by the ways in which cultural institutions (medical, religious, political, psychological, scholarly disciplines) create and defend norms of social and sexual acceptability. She is particularly interested in the creative ways people negotiate, resist and are, at times, complicit with sexual hegemony. This interest has been at the heart of her research on the sex industry which was the topic of her first book Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships Between Exotic Dancers and their Regular Customers (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and more recently, in her writing on the history of ideas on the child and sexuality featured in her new co-authored book Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Danielle's new book, Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of Girls and Sexualization (Polity 2013) examines the assumptions and implications at the heart of popular literature on the sexualization of children. Becoming Sexual was named the book of the week by the Times Higher Education Supplement and has been reviewed and/or featured in The Guardian and The Australian. Her research has also been discussed on BBC Radio 4 and NPRs Good Parenting Radio. Her research with Gail Hawkes was sought out by the Home Office in England and by the Scottish Government. She has contributed to the Wellcomme Archive and Trust Report on Sexualization. In addition to her work as a professor, she is a psychoanalytic candidate at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. When she is not trying to wrap her head around the complex brew of age, gender, race, class and nation and how it shapes issues of sexuality, you will find Danielle enjoying sweet single track on her mountain bike Julie or hiking in the Adirondacks with her trusty pup Milo.