A Practice of Pleasure

This intimate collection explores the life and work of Joanna Frueh. Featuring previously unpublished texts from her career, A Practice of Pleasure offers a candid, scholarly, and personal meditation on female, sexual, and everyday pleasures, embodying Frueh’s unique approach to art and life. 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 materialization of pausing and observing in a long career and a newly spacious life, on the way to fresh revelations and explorations of pleasure. 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 Written during a key transitional moment in her life and work (2005-2012), the volume makes available primarily unpublished performance texts and writings that give an intimate insight both into Frueh’s everyday life and the thinking of an artist and scholar well known for offering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.

Pagina's: 322, Hardcover, Manchester University Press