A List
4/17/06

DANIELLE EGAN SELECTED PISKOR LECTURER AT SLU

CANTON - St. Lawrence University Assistant Professor of Sociology R. Danielle Egan has been named the Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lecturer for 2007. Next spring, Egan will deliver a campus lecture on the topic "Between Angels and the Pathologically Prurient: Moral Education and the Production of Childhood Sexuality."

She will examine the role of "social purity campaigners" and "moral educationalists" in their attempts to shape views of children's sexuality. According to Egan, in the early 1900s, "social purity activists and moral educationalists fused with another social movement - social hygiene. Both purity and social hygiene employed moralizing discourses on children's sexuality recommending the locus of social control on a child's life be the mother in the home, perpetuating conservative ideas of hearth and home. Social hygiene further legitimated the cause of moral education by placing its concerns within the parameters of disease and health as opposed to only religion. Forming associations such as the White Cross League and the Purity and Hygiene Association in England, Australia and the United States, social hygienists worked to create a 'healthy society' - both corporeally and morally. Health in their movement became racially associated, getting equated with anti-miscegenation and the protection of whiteness. Incorporating a type of moral public health campaign, these organizations targeted working-class organizations to spread their message.

"Through intensive historical and archival research, I hope that my lecture will offer insight into this complex and interesting aspect of the socio-cultural history of sexuality," Egan says.

A faculty member at St. Lawrence since 2000, Egan is a graduate of Goucher College and earned the Ph.D. at Boston College. She has published work in Critical Sociology; Body and Society; Deviant Behavior; and The Journal of Psychoanalysis, Society and Culture. She is the author of the book Dancing for Dollars and Paying for Love: The Relationships Between Exotic Dancers and Their Regulars and one of three editors of the book of essays Flesh For Fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance. In addition to her work on exotic dance, she has written on post-9/11 rhetoric, pedagogy and popular culture. Egan received the Louis and Frances Maslow Award at St. Lawrence in 2005; it annually goes to the faculty member who has shown "the most interest in and understanding of the education and welfare of the student body as a whole."

The Piskor Faculty Lectureship was established in 1979 to encourage original and continued research among St. Lawrence faculty members, to recognize and honor distinguished scholarship and to afford the opportunity for faculty to share their learning with the academic community.

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