A Practice of Pleasure

A Practice of Pleasure is an intimate and panoramic entrée into the life and work of Joanna Frueh during a moment of significant transformation in her life and her work. Presenting performance texts and writings on everyday life by Frueh between 2005 and 2011, this book charts the thinking of an artist and scholar well known for offering her own experiences as a means of embodying and speaking about pleasure: 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.

Written by a pleasure activist during six years of a mature, intensely focused self-study and self-care, this book offers a highly original perspective on pleasure--frank, scholarly, philosophical, romantic, and conversational--from a respected performance artist and scholar who is known as a feminist trailblazer in intellectual and erotic terrains. In its exposition of pleasures and of ways to experience, think, and talk about them, this book expands the meaning and parameters of pleasure from the conventionally imagined and lived categories into which people confine it.

A Practice of Pleasure is a materialisation of pausing and observing in a long career and a newly spacious life, on the way to fresh revelations and explorations of pleasure.

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.