Swooning Beauty
ISBN: 9780874176681
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Nevada Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Parents; Chocolate; Sex (Psychology); Pleasure.; Divorced women; Middle aged women;

A performance artist and art history professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, Frueh has a lot to say about her own sexuality. She shares with readers her girlhood masturbation pleasures, her memory of seeing her parents having sex and her parents' celebration of her first period. She describes her various experiences of arousal and orgasm, as well as her intense identification with Mel Gibson in Braveheart. She discusses favorite outfits, perfumes and makeup. Now and then she mentions her love of chocolate and sensuous flowers, and her theories about why people admire her "luminous sexuality" and find her so "seductive" and "glamorous." Yet it may be hard for some readers to find Frueh as fascinating as she finds herself. For Frueh's wing of the avant-garde, it's liberating to be into beauty, especially "high femininity" styling. Thus she dismisses Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues as insufficiently outrageous or revolutionary, only to go on for pages about the wonderfulness of the color pink, or how hot she thinks she looks in her Betsey Johnson dress with her cute little ankle boots. Frueh's book will be too narcissistic for most readers, though those who enjoy deep discussions of vaginas and vulvas will certainly be pleased. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved


Joanna Frueh is an art critic and art historian, a writer, an actress, a singer, and a multidisciplinary and performance artist. A professor of art history at the University of Nevada, Reno, her publications include essays, scholarly articles, edited volumes, and two books, Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love and Erotic Faculties. Known for her personal and autobiographical approach to ideas, Frueh is more revealing than ever in Swooning Beauty . There her trailblazing consciousness continues the exploration of love, eros, sex, and human relations that appear in her previous books. Frueh's performance texts and her writings on contemporary art and women artists have appeared in numerous books and journals. Recognized as a powerful, provocative, and articulate performer, she has presented her one-woman shows--as well as lectures--at museums, galleries, universities, and conferences in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the UK. Please visit her website at www.joannafrueh.com

hidden image for function call