ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For good or ill, all the people a person has ever met live within her. Some she must exorcise, while she works to increase the presence, if only partial, of others, who have provided comforts and pleasures, opportunities for loving in everyday life and in work. I thank those providers, who have helped me develop and exercise my erotic faculties: you release the perceived taint of the never entirely exorcised; you are the exorcists.

I think of you in the order in which we came into each other's lives.

Erne and Florence Frueh, my parents, whose love has sustained me all my life

Renée Wood, my sister, whose beauties become stronger to me the older we get

Ida and Sam Pass, my mother's parents, who prophesied my future

Sarah Lewis, my oldest friend, a superb and sensuous cook, a delightful traveling companion and drinking partner, who has, for over half our lives, offered her gracious and tranquil self and home whenever I visit New York

Everett Clarke, without whose teachings my voice and spirit would not have thrived as they do

Claire Prussian, with whom I've shared the best of ladies' lunches, the richest talk about fashion, style, cosmetic surgery, the lightness of intimacy

Edith Altman, mystic sister of unquestioning understanding

Arlene Raven, critic comrade of acid and poetic honesty

Carolee Schneemann, courageous erotic

Thomas Kochheiser, who made it possible for me to write about Hannah Wilke, which I had wanted to do for several years, by asking me to write the catalog essay for his Wilke retrospective in 1989

M. M. Lum, whose stories I love

Peggy Doogan, whose trenchant literacy and nasty humor unclog my heart

The students in the first performance art class I taught, at the University of Arizona, in the fall of 1984: David Flynn, Dawn Fryling, Charles Gute, Nancy Hall Brooks, Willie Hulce, Janet Maier, Dan Mejia, Jim Mousigian, Maureen O'Neill, Pat Riley, Susan Ruff The spell you put on me keeps me charmed

Rachel Rosenthal, so sweet and glamorous

Leila Daw, who shows me the meaning of frenzy, who tells me visions

Kate Rosenbloom, now Anderson, whose laughter and complexion are astonishingly clear

Marla Schorr, who gave me a place to live when I had no home

Russell Dudley, whom I married and who married me out of sanity and pleasure, whose acute criticisms are loving touches, whose photographs enrich Erotic Faculties

Christine Tamblyn, responsive writing and performing partner

Jeff Weiss, whose lush acerbity and relentless integrity have banished the almost unbearable absurdities of academia and the art world

Helen Jones and Steve Foster, who talk with me about ecstasy, perversions, and ruthless compassion

Members of the Research Advisory Board at the University of Nevada, Reno, who, in 1992, granted me a Faculty Research Award to assist in my research on contemporary women artists and aging, work that informs the chapter in this volume on "Polymorphous Perversities: Female Pleasures and the Postmenopausal Artist"

Johanna Burton and Heidie Giannotti, whose backyard is magic

Naomi Schneider and William Murphy, editor and assistant editor at the University of California Press, whose enthusiasm for the unconventional has made Erotic Faculties possible and with whom conversation is erotic

Nola Burger, for the beautiful design of Erotic Faculties

Dore Brown and Jane-Ellen Long, at the University of California Press, for their subtle, elegant, and expert treatment of the manuscript