R. Danielle Egan is Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. Her research examines the ways in which our society creates and polices sexual acceptability. She is particularly interested in the creative ways people negotiate, resist and are, at times, complicit with dominant cultural views on sexuality. 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 and more recently, in her writing on the history of ideas on the child and sexuality with Gail Hawkes in Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity. Danielle's current book, Becoming Sexual: A Critical Appraisal of the Sexualization of Girls analyzes the popular rhetoric on sexualization to unpack the gendered, classed and racialized assumptions at work in this movement.

This book takes an in-depth look at the relationships exotic dancers have with their regular customers, and explores the limits of using feminist theory to discuss sex work. Incorporating interviews, personal accounts, and field notes, Egan sheds light on the feminist debates on sex work and women's power. She focuses in on the dynamics of desire and fantasy in exotic dance clubs to illustrate the complexity of gendered relations in everyday life. This is an accessible, revealing, and new look at a perennially intriguing and divisive subject--ideal teaching material for undergraduate courses in a variety of fields.