Theorizing the Sexual Child in Modernity

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 emotion in the Anglophone west. Historical analysis of the past two centuries offers some challenging and insightful answers. Drawing on a wide range of materials from Enlightenment philosophy, medicine, social purity, sexual hygiene, sexology, psychoanalysis, and chil...