Monster Beauty

"This book is as seductive as the phenomenon that it explores. With courage, love, and joy, Frueh crosses into unexplored terrains of beauty and pleasure, where she finds a grotesquely captivating creature: Monster/Beauty. By illuminating her journey with thoughtful insight and engaging prose, she encourages readers to join her in her quest to articulate fresh ways of thinking about the aesthetic and the erotic and of theorizing the flux of lived experience." —John Alan Farmer, senior editor of Art Journal "Monster/Beauty is a daringly provocative experiment in personal and erotic writing and an important book for anyone interested in breaking normative codes of beauty, pedagogy, and authorial methodology. In a richly self-revealing text, Frueh proposes nothing less than a Rabellaisian re-ordering of aesthetic embodiments within social relations." —Mira Schor, author of Wet: On Painting, Feminism, and Art Culture "Giving new meaning to "embodied writing," this book goes farther than any other toward getting the body into the text. Joanna Frueh is a performance artist first-she is also an art historian, a singer, a poet, a bodybuilder, a professor, an academic celebrity of modest fame, but her performances collapse these distinctions. Frueh's intensely personal, intensely physical prose brings an aura of presence to the book that rivals the effect she achieves on stage." —Robyn Warhol, co-editor of Feminisms "This book is monstrous--full of gorgeous hypermuscular women, step-mothers, and vampires; full of ravishing muscular sex, classroom erotics, splendid aging. It is a performance in which Frueh explores and celebrates her body, its powers and beauties, and those of her friends and lovers." —Alphonso Lingis, author of Excesses, Abuses, and Dangerous Emotions "A welcome voice in contemporary feminist theory, Frueh's Monster/Beauty reminds us of the pleasures of thinking, teaching and creating in wholly embodied, sensual and passionate acts. Frueh poetically enacts the self as an aesthetic/erotic project, affirming the many different and beautiful selves we can become. It is a joy to read." —Marsha Meskimmon, author of We Weren't Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism "Joanna Frueh is a hero. I sleep better knowing she's out there writing and thinking." —Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours