A Practice of Pleasure is an intimate and panoramic entrée into the life and work of Joanna Frueh (1948-2020), an art historian and performance practitioner for whom life and art were inseparable. Written during a key transitional moment in her life and work (2005-2012), the volume makes available primarily unpublished performance texts and writings that give an intimate insight both into Frueh’s everyday life and the thinking of an artist and scholar well known for offering her personal experiences as a means of embodying and speaking about pleasure. A self-described ‘pleasure activist’, Frueh’s book offers a highly original perspective on pleasure—frank, scholarly, philosophical, romantic, and conversational. Taken together, the texts comprising A Practice of Pleasure are an ode to pleasure in the widest sense: female pleasure, sexual pleasure, and the pleasures of prosaic and domestic beauties, such as enjoying the reality of her own body and the luxurious simplicities of the senses.
Price: £85.00
Pages: 320
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Imprint: Manchester University Press
Publication Date:
25 November 2025
ISBN: 9781526189318
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
ART / Criticism & Theory, Performance art, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory, ART / Performance, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Sexuality (see also PSYCHOLOGY / Human Sexuality), Feminism and feminist theory, Sex and sexuality, social aspects
Joanna Frueh (1948-2020) was a performance artist, writer, scholar, and teacher. For more than twenty-five years, she performed one-woman shows throughout the United States and abroad. She was Professor of the Practice of Art at the University of Arizona and Professor of Art History Emerita at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her authored works include Swooning Beauty: A Memoir of Pleasure; Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love; Erotic Faculties; and Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective.
Editorial Introduction: A Correspondence with Critical Intimacy – Marsha Meskimmon
Illustrations
Editorial Note
Figures
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: PRACTICES OF BODY AND MIND
I Responsiveness
The Performer as a Work in Progress
Presentness
The Honesty of a “Provocateur” and an “Iconoclast”
Perceptions from a Discerning Body
Lovestruck Play and Lovestruck Unions
Being Aphrodite
Beauty, Economy, and Necessity
Dress/Habits
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
Yoga (with Some Words about Bodybuilding)
Everyday Life
A Time Defined by Honey
II Reading
How I Used to Read
How I Read Now
A Very Select Bibliography from 2004–2010 with Some Comments
III Theory: In Behalf of Muses
Why I Love the Boys
Two Pearls and Many Kisses
Bless You, Boys, I Wish You Well
IV Conversation: Salons
Assumptions
Be Perfect Be Perfect Be Perfect With Me
The Ultimate Tenderness of Resurrection
The Efficiency of Peace
Not Driven Anymore
The Exceptional Person
Wild Sacred Space
Dreaming the World into Being
PART TWO: THE RESULTS OF PLEASURE
V Performing
Performing and Re-Performing: Debuts and Transformations
Readings and Performances
Audio and Video Pieces
Photography
The Activity and Experience of Performing, from Seductiveness to Comedy and Specialness to Serenity
VI Performance Texts, 2005–2010
A Flowering of Vision 2005
Maiden Elder 2006
The Sphinx Unwinds Her Own Sweet Self 2007
Goddess of Roses 2007
Sexual Advances 2009
The Dark Lord and His Wily Mistress 2009
I AM Desire 2010
