Danielle Egan

R. Danielle Egan, the Fuller-Maathai Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies at Connecticut College, is Dean of the Faculty and Chief Academic Officer. The highest-ranking officer after the president, the Dean of the Faculty is responsible for providing academic leadership for the College and its faculty.

Danielle Egan’s 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 also 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 co-authored book Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

Egan’s latest 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.

Professor Egan’s research has also been discussed on BBC Radio 4 and NPR's Good Parenting Radio. Her research with Gail Hawkes was sought out by the Home Office in England and by the Scottish Government. She contributed to the Wellcomme Archive and Trust Report on Sexualization.

At Connecticut College, she teaches GWS 103, Sex/Culture/Power: an Introduction to Gender and Women's Studies; GWS 306, Advanced Readings in Feminist Theory; and new electives in sexuality studies.

When not in the classroom or in her office, she enjoys as much time as possible with her two daughters, working with individuals as a psychoanalyst, or in her studio painting.

Books

• Renold, Emma, Jessica Ringrose, R. Danielle Egan (eds) Children, Sexuality, Sexualisation. London; Palgrave UK. 2015
• Egan, R. Danielle, Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of Girls and Sexualization.Cambridge: Polity Press. 2013. Book of the Week, Times Higher Educational Supplement (THE)  2/28/13. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/becoming-sexual-by-r-danielle-egan/2001986.article
• Egan, R. Danielle and Gail Hawkes, Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press. 2010.

Invited lectures

• “Gender and Sexual Diversity and the Practice of Psychoanalysis.” Workshop for the Boston Graduate School of Education Continuing Education Program
• 2015 “Countertransference and Community Work on Sexual and Gender Diversity.” Keynote Presentation for the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis Annual Meeting.
• “Affective Constellations and Sexuality Scholarship.” The Department of Humanities and Cultural Studies Distinguished Scholar Lecture at the University of Washington at Bothell. 

Major or minor in Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies.

Visit the Gender, Sexuality and Intersectionality Studies website.