1. This paragraph and the previous one are from Joanna Frueh, "Desert City" (unpublished novel, 1988), 120, 165.

2. Michael Payne, "Criticism, Ideology and Fiction: An Interview with Terry Eagleton," in Terry Eagleton, The Significance of Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 88.

3. Poetry or poetic language is part of the following significant feminist thinkers' work: Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Arlene Raven, Judy Grahn, Mary Daly, Paula Gunn Allen, Luce Irigaray, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Hélène Cixous, and Susan Griffin.

4. Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," in Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1984).

5. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women's Lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 105-38, deals with the importance of embodied knowledge for feminist epistemology.

6. See Adam Begley, "The I's Have It," Lingua Franca (March/April 1989): 54-59, for a light discussion about academics who have turned to personalist prose.

7. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? 275.

8. Robyn Warhol, "The Narratee as Other in Harriet Jacobs's Text"(paper presented to members of the Women's Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Reno, April 1994), noted that detective novels demonstrate the masculine sentimental and that the sentimental can be recuperated as a feminine value. See also Robyn Warhol, "So as You Stand, so You Feel and Are: The Crying Body and the Nineteenth-Century Text," in Frances E. Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharpe, eds., Tattoo, Torture, Mutilation, and Adornment: The Denaturalization of the Body in Culture and Text (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 100-125, for an enlightening discussion about sentimentality.

9. In Basic Instinct the Michael Douglas hero calls the Sharon Stone seductress "the fuck of the century." Madonna's statement comes from her book Sex , ed. Glenn O'Brien (New York: Warner Books, 1992), unpaginated.

10. The letter writer wishes to remain anonymous.

11. "Clinton Dons More Modest Jogging Garb," Chicago Tribune , Section I, 17 June 1994, 2.

12. This section is adapted from Russell Dudley and Joanna Frueh, "Amazing Grace," performance, 1989. "Amazing Grace" appeared in Caprice (July 1990): 57-72.

13. "Oracular Voice" is the title of a paper I delivered at the International Student Festival, Montage '93, Brockport, New York, July 1993.

14. Telephone conversation with an artist who wishes to remain anonymous, 26 June 1993.

"Fuck Theory" is a revision of a performance with the same title that was delivered on the panel "Postmodernism in the Classroom: What Are We Talking About?" Society for Photographic Education Conference, Washington, D.C., March 1992.

1. Karl Lagerfeld, quoted in Maureen Orth, "Kaiser Karl—Behind the Mask," Vanity Fair (February 1992): 158.

2. Jean Baudrillard, "Design and Environment, Or How Political Economy Escalates into Cyberblitz," in his For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 205-2.

3. Donna J. Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 153; and see Patricia Smith with Paula Gunn Allen, "Earthly Relations, Carnal Knowledge: Southwestern American Indian Women Writers and Landscape," in Vera Norwood and Janice Monk, eds., The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women's Writing and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 174-96, for a discussion of the relationship between sexuality and wilderness.

4. David Joselit, "Projected Identities," Art in America 79 (November 1991): 121.

5. Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 8-9, writes, "'Carnal knowing' refers to an activity in which the intimate interdependence and irreducible cooperation of thinking, feeling, sensing, and understanding is revealed. . . . The consanguinity of human beings depends on mutual recognition of the common bond of a sentient body, whose most vivid experiences create consciousness."

"Mouth Piece" has been performed at:
Columbia College Dance Center, Chicago, Illinois, February 1989
Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, November 1990
Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachusetts, February 1992
The LAB, San Francisco, California, January 1993
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, February 1994

An excerpt from "Mouth Piece" was published in P-FORM (Winter 1991) and is reprinted by permission of P-FORM.

1. I have altered this passage from Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), III, in two ways. In Brownmiller the end of the first sentence I quote reads, "It is in woman's nature to talk too much." Also, I add, "Ah! But men gush. Gushers."

2. I have altered and condensed four paragraphs from Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype , trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 297-98.

3. I have altered one paragraph from Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 89.

4. I have transposed and paraphrased W. Joy Brugh, Joy's Way: A Map for the Transformational Journey (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1979), 70.

5. Arthur C. Danto, "Approaching the End of Art," The State of the Art (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 210.

6. Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," trans. Claudia Reeder, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Schocken, 1981), 100.

7. The preceding paragraphs in this section are a transposition and alteration of material in Neumann, The Great Mother , 168, 170-72

8. Robin Tolmach Lakoff and Raquel L. Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 212.

9. In this paragraph I have altered Neumann, The Great Mother , 170.

Work on this paper was supported by a Faculty Research Award from the University of Nevada, Reno. I especially appreciate the travel funds that allowed me to interview artists across the United States. My deep thanks go to the artists, for their time, honesty, and interest in this project.

Parts of this chapter appeared in M/E/A/N/I/N/G 14 (November 1993) and are reprinted by permission of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues.

Other versions of "Polymorphous Perversities" have been delivered at:
The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, June 1993
Art Works Gallery; San Jose, California, July 1993
Artemisia Gallery; Chicago, Illinois, October 1993
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, February 1994
Women in Photography Conference, Houston, Texas, March 1994

1. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 150, and Diana Vreeland, D. V. , ed. George Plimpton and Christopher Hemphill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 94.

2. I choose fifty because it is the median age at which menopause occurs for Western women and because menopause remains a powerful marker of aging. From June 1992 through January 1993 I sent questionnaires to one hundred women visual artists throughout the United States and interviewed women artists who deal with aging or the body in their work. Sixty-one people responded to the questionnaire, and all subjects were fifty or older. Key feminist writings on the erotic and female pleasure were published in the 1970s. They include Carter, The Sadeian Woman; Hélène Cixous, "Le Rire de la méduse," L'Arc 61 (1975): 39-54; Luce Irigaray, Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977); Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 53-59; and Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body, trans. David Le Vay (New York: Avon, 1975). In this paper I have used the following translations: Hélène Cixous, ''The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms: An Anthology (New York: Schocken, 1981), 245-64, and Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," trans. Claudia Reeder, in Marks and de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms, 99-106.

3. Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 71.

4. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents , 16, writes, "In Western culture age takes precedence over and may swallow up gender."

5. Laura Mulvey's classic essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6-18, tells the reader, "It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this essay. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked; not in favor of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, or of intellectualized unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire." Many feminists have used Mulvey's ideas to wage war against the male gaze that fixes woman as pleasure icon, and against the representation of the female body.

These interdictions have served to stymie exploration down certain avenues of female (visual) pleasure. Fear of the male gaze, which gives the power of looking and of projecting desire only to men and to patriarchal-pleasure disciplines, such as film and advertising, that designate the female body as an object and a spectacle of sex, robs women of their own bodies, the enjoyment of looking at themselves and other women with aroused, loving eyes. Two recent alternatives to Mulvey are Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment, eds., The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture (Seattle: Real Comet Press, 1989), and Cassandra Langer, "Transgressing Le Droit du Seigneur: The Lesbian Feminist Defining Herself in Art History," in Joanna Frueh, Cassandra Langer, and Arlene Raven, eds., New Feminist Criticism: Art, Identity, Action (New York: HarperCollins, 1994).

6. Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 131.

7. Margaret Simons, "In Memoriam," Yale French Studies 72 (1986): 204.

8. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents, 158-59, tells one story from anthropologist Michèle Dacher's and psychoanalyst Micheline Weinstein's The Story of Louise: Old People in a Nursing Home . The book gives psychoanalytic portraits of eight people who live in a French nursing home and focuses also on Louise, a seventy-two-year-old bistro habitué. She had platinum blonde hair; she downed liquor, sung loud, and exchanged obscenities with others; her lipstick was dark, applied beyond her mouth's contours; and she was physically dirty. Woodward writes, "The point of course is that Louise's ferocious excess was a sign of her desire—quite literally her erotic desire for a man named Jean—and a measure of her more general powerful investment in life. Her remarkable appetite and energy, her flamboyance, which had nothing to do with parody, drew these two younger women to her."

9. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 108-9, writes with elegant sarcasm, "For men, to fuck is to have some arcane commerce with this place of ultimate privilege. . . . The womb is the earth and also the grave of being; it is the warm, moist, dark, inward, secret, forbidden, fleshly core of the unknowable labyrinth of our experience. . . . Only men are privileged to return, even if only partially and intermittently, to this place of fleshly extinction; and that is why they have a better grasp of eternity and abstract concepts than we do. They want it for themselves, of course. . . . This is the most sacred of all places. Women are sacred because they possess it."

10. Elinor Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 289.

11. Louise Kaplan, Female Perversions: The Temptations of Emma Bovary (New York: Anchor, 1991), 507-8, writes about the looseness of desire: "The nymphet, the skin surface of the body, the curving neck . . . are not intrinsically beautiful or exciting. . . . These potential objects of desire are not sexually exciting until someone invests them with erotic value and with fantasies of desire. Because human sexuality is more a matter of imagination and fantasy than of biology, nothing pertaining to our sexuality is predetermined. . . . It is no more human to experience erotic desire for a person than to invest a fetish object

with erotic desire. . . . This polymorphous sexuality of ours . . . protects individuals from complete domination by the social order."

12. I quote from Rainer's film Privilege . The next paragraph provides the context.

13. Grant Kester, "Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public," Afterimage 20 (January 1993): 14.

14. I use the phrase "feminine forever" loosely, to describe practices or performances of femininity that continue postreproductively, parody, or otherwise manipulate conventional femininity. The phrase comes from Dr. Robert A. Wilson, Feminine Forever (New York: M. Evans, 1966), which offers misogynist misinformation about menopause. A few examples are: "The woman becomes the equivalent of a eunuch," "I have seen untreated women who had shriveled into caricatures of their former selves," and ''No woman can be sure of escaping the horror of this living decay." "Serenity and Power," in Germaine Greer's The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 363-87, positively and extensively treats the matron. Barbara Walker's The Crone: Woman of Age, Wisdom, and Power (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985) revives the Crone for contemporary use and contemplation.

15. Reagon briefly commented on menopause as a guest on the MacNeill-Lehrer News Hour , 20 January 1993.

16. After thinking about the art of flying, I remembered Cixous's paragraph on flying in "The Laugh of the Medusa," 258. I quote the last sentence: "They ( illes ) [women] go by, fly the coop, take pleasure in jumbling the order of space, in disorienting it, in changing around the furniture, dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down."

17. Quoted in Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life , 60.

18. Quoted in ibid., 124.

17. Quoted in Heilbrun, Writing a Woman's Life , 60.

18. Quoted in ibid., 124.

19. Others over fifty who deal with aging, the female body, and/or female pleasure in their art are Anne Noggle, May Stevens, Ida Applebroog, Hannah Wilke (died 28 Janury 1993), Joan Semmel, Vera Klement, Rachel Rosenthal, Elise Mitchell Sanford, Nancy Spero, Louise Bourgeois, Charle Varble, Athena Tacha, Leila Daw, and Barbara Hammer (filmmaker).

20. "Realistic Feminists: An Interview with Valerie Scott, Peggy Miller, and Ryan Hotchkiss of the Canadian Organization for the Rights of Prostitutes (CORP)," in Laurie Bell, ed., Good Girls/Bad Girls: Feminists and Sex Trade Workers Face to Face (Seattle: Seal Press, 1987), 213.

21. All Doogan's statements were made during a telephone conversation with the author, 4 February 1993.

22. Doogan's nudes are "theoretical insofar as they investigate the very fundamentals of visuality, representation, and image construction." See Johanna Drucker, "Visual Pleasure: A Feminist Perspective," M/E/A/N/I/N/G 11 (May 1992): 8.

23. Gail Sheehy's "The Unspeakable Passage: Is There a Male Menopause?" Vanity Fair (April 1993): 164-67, 218-20, 222-27, may inspire sympathy for men's thinning hair, impotence, and sexual and professional insecurities.

24. See Joanna Frueh, "The Fear of Flesh That Moves," High Performance 14 (Fall 1991): 70-71, for a discussion of the dread and pleasures of bodily liminality.

25. Wittig, The Lesbian Body , 37.

26. Ibid., 159. In the introduction to The Lesbian Body Margaret Crosland quotes Wittig regarding her pronouns: " J/e is the symbol of the lived, rending experience which is m/y writing, of this cutting in two which throughout literature is the exercise of a language which does not constitute m/e as subject."

27. Lorraine O'Grady, "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity," Afterimage 20 (Summer 1992): 14, articulates the black female body's construction as chaos in relation to the white female body. Her thinking helped me to understand the old(er) female body's construction as chaos in relation to the young(er) female body.

28. Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 767.

29. For an extended analysis and interpretation of Doogan's work see Joanna Frueh, "Bailey Doogan: Reconciliation," Artists of Conscience II, exhibition catalogue (New York: Alternative Museum, 1992), 25-31.

30. Claire Prussian, undated letter received by the author in February 1993. All the following statements are taken from an interview with the author, 8 June 1992, Chicago.

31. Critiques include Wendy Chapkis, Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance (Boston: South End, 1986), Robin Tolmach Lakoff and Raquel L. Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), and Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: Anchor, 1991).

32. See Belinda Budge, "Joan Collins and the Wilder Side of Women: Exploring Pleasure and Representation," and Shelagh Young, "Feminism and the Politics of Power: Whose Gaze Is It Anyway?" in Gamman and Marshment, The Female Gaze , 102-11, 173-88, for feminist considerations and conflicts about sex queens Madonna and Joan Collins.

33. Wolf, The Beauty Myth , 286.

34. Chantal Akerman quoted in Teresa de Lauretis, "Aesthetic and Feminist Theory: Rethinking Women's Cinema," in Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh, eds., Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 137. Originally published in New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985).

35. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents , 63.

36. See ibid., 67, for a discussion of the mirror stage of old age.

35. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents , 63.

36. See ibid., 67, for a discussion of the mirror stage of old age.

37. Schneemann's words are from an Interview with the author, 18 June 1992, New York, except for "hand-touch sensibility," which is from a text Schneemann read as part of the performance Interior Scroll, originally given in 1975, and "a jouissance beyond the phallus," which appears in Lisa Jardine's "The Politics of Impenetrability," in Teresa Brennan, ed., Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1989), 64.

38. Rosetta Reitz, Menopause: A Positive Approach (London: Penguin, 1977), 104-5, compiled a "Twinge List" of "words and phrases used to describe menopause and the menopausal woman." Cultural conceptions of menopause are currently undergoing revision, but attitudes in some of Reitz's list, pertaining to the dried-up and damaged old(er) woman, have not disappeared. Here are a number of the entries: "breasts atrophy," "breasts shrink," "vagina shrivels," "atrophic mucosal surfaces," "tissues dry out,'' "atrophic vaginitis," " castration," "clitoral hypertrophy," "damaged body," "dowager's hump, entire genital system dries up," "eunuch," "femininity abridged," "genital atrophy," "her body betrays her," "sexual neuters," "shrunken hag."

39. The artist wishes to maintain anonymity.

40. Interview with the author, 18 June 1992.

41. The artist wishes to maintain anonymity.

42. Carolee Schneemann quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York: Dutton, 1976), 126.

43. Schneemann used "strange origami" in a telephone conversation with the author, 26 June 1993.

44. The artist wishes to maintain anonymity.

45. Jessica Benjamin, "A Desire of One's Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space," in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 78-101, develops many ideas applicable to Schneemann's art.

46. David Joselit makes this mistake in "Projected Identities," Art in America 79 (November 1991): 121. He writes, "In its dependence on supposedly timeless symbols of the female body—the violin, fertility figures, the vagina itself—Schneemann's work seems to assert that femininity is something timeless and unchanging and based on the body alone." If Joselit wants an essentialist statement he should read Madonna, Sex , ed. Glenn O'Brien (New York: Warner, 1992), unpaginated: "I love my pussy; it is the complete summation of my life. It's the place where the most painful things have happened. But it has given me indescribable pleasure. My pussy is the temple of learning." Joselit should also take note that a vulva is not a vagina.

47. Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 128. She wonders, "Could not the object of genital hatred [the mother's vulva] become the object of genital love?" (132).

48. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 34-36, 48-51, 53, 55.

49. Barbara Hepworth quoted in Cassandra Langer, "Against the Grain: A Working Gynergenic Art Criticism," in Raven, Langer, and Frueh, eds., Feminist Art Criticism , 125.

1. Morris Berman's The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) was helpful as I thought about minding the body.

2. Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, "Textual Strategies: The Politics of Art-Making," in Arlene Raven, Cassandra Langer, and Joanna Frueh, eds., Feminist Art Criticism: An Anthology (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 89. Originally published in Screen (Summer 1980).

3. Jane Weinstock, "A Lass, a Laugh, and a Lad," Art in America 71 (Summer 1983): 7.

4. Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 11-12, writes, "The expanse of our Journey is Astral/Archaic and the Voyagers are Archelogians whose Lust is fueled by the influence of the stars."

5. Nancy Spero, "Letters: On Women and Laughter," and Jane Weinstock's reply, Art in America 71 (November 1983): 7.

6. Weinstock, "A Lass, a Laugh, and a Lad," 7.

7. Eleanor Heartney, "How Wide Is the Gender Gap?" Artnews 86 (Summer 1987): 140.

8. Alice Neel, quoted in Cindy Nemser, "Forum: Women in Art," Art Talk: Conversations with 12 Women Artists (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971), 10.

9. Moira Roth, "Visions and Re-Visions: Rosa Luxemburg and the Artist's Mother," in Raven, Langer, and Frueh, eds., Feminist Art Criticism, 99-110. Originally published in Artforum (November 1980).

10. Weinstock, "A Lass, a Laugh, and a Lad," 10.

11. Spero, "Letters," 7.

"Duel/Duet" has been performed at:

Name Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, November 1989
Women's Caucus for Art Conference, New York, New York, February 1990
Southern Exposure Gallery, San Francisco, California, December 1990
Yolanda Lopez performed with Christine Tamblyn and myself at Southern Exposure.

1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Astarte Syriaca," in Jerome H. Buckley, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 153.

2. Kaja Silverman, "Histoire d'O: The Construction of a Female Subject," in Carol S. Vance, ed., Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 325.

3. Karen Finley, "Why Can't This Veal Calf Walk?" Whole Earth Review (Summer 1989): 49.

4. Maryse Holder, Give Sorrow Words: Maryse Holder's Letters from Mexico (New York: Grove Press, 1979).

5. I play with Bobby Vinton, "Blue Velvet," Epic 9614, and the Beach Boys, "Barbara Ann," Party! Capitol DMAS-2398.

6. Kate Ellis, Barbara O'Dair, and Abby Tallmer, "Introduction" to F.A.C.T. Collective, ed., Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship (New York: Caught Looking, 1986), 6.

7. Hélène Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1, no. 4 (1976): 45.

8. Mary Russo, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

9. Laura Dayton, "Caribbean Conflict," FLEX (March 1989): 64.

10. Gary Strydom, "Huge and Hard," FLEX (March 1989): 25, 27, and Dayton, "Caribbean Conflict," 66.

11. Dayton, "Caribbean Conflict," 106.

12. Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 27.

13. Laura Mulvey, "Film, Feminism, and the Avant-Garde," Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 122.

14. Daniel Schreber, Mémoires d'un neuropath (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 67.

Parts of this chapter were presented at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, March 1989.

Parts of this chapter appear in Joanna Frueh, Hannah Wilke, ed. Thomas H. Kochheiser (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 51-61; in Joanna Frueh, "Aesthetic and Postmenopausal Pleasures," M/E/A/N/I/N/G 14 (November 1993); and in Joanna Frueh, "The Erotic as Social Security," Art Journal 53 (Spring 1994). Material from M/E/A/N/I/N/G is reprinted by permission of M/E/A/N/I/N/G: A Journal of Contemporary Art Issues , and material from Art Journal is reprinted by permission of the College Art Association.

1. Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 24.

2. Una Stannard, "The Mask of Beauty," in Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society. Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York: Mentor, 1971), 187-203, and Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women (New York: William Morrow, 1991).

3. Carolee Schneemann, in an interview with the author, 18 June 1992. Wilke first used "Venus envy" in a 1980 series of Polaroid photographs, and she spoke about Venus envy in conversation with the author, 9 June 1988.

4. Hannah Wilke, "Intercourse with . . . ," text for videotape performance, London Art Gallery, London, Ontario, Canada, 17 February 1977.

5. This and the quoted statements in the previous paragraph come from a conversation I had with Wilke on 9 June 1988.

6. Anne d'Harnoncourt and Walter Hopps, Etant donnés: i °la chute d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage. Reflections on a New Work by Marcel Duchamp (Philadelphia: Phildelphia Museum of Art, 1973), 64.

7. Hannah Wilke in conversation with the author, 9 June 1988.

8. Marcel Duchamp in Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking, 1971), 88.

9. Hannah Wilke in conversation with the author, 9 June 1988.

10. Robin Lakoff and Raquel L. Scherr, Face Value: The Politics of Beauty (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 14-15.

11. Brownmiller, Femininity , 18.

12. Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 3.

13. Hannah Wilke in Chris Huestis and Marvin Jones, "Hannah Wilke: Hannah Wilke's Art, Politics, Religion and Feminism," The New Common Good (May 1985): 9.

14. Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center. Feminist Essays on Women's Art (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 126.

15. Barbara G. Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 350-51.

16. See chapter 2, "No Rite of Passage," and chapter 17, "Serenity and Power," in Germaine Greer, The Change: Women, Aging and the Menopause (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992).

17. Wilke used the phrase "beauty to beast" regarding her appearance in conversation with the author in early June 1992.

18. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.

19. Susan Sontag, "The Double Standard of Aging," Saturday Review (23 September 1972): 37.

20. All Wilke's statements about her illness and INTRA-VENUS are from telephone conversations with the author, 11 May 1992 and 9 January 1993.

21. Linda Singer's "Hospitalization and AIDS," in Linda Singer, Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic , ed. and introduced by Judith Butler and Maureen MacGrogan (London: Routledge, 1993), 100-107, informed my thinking about hospitals and Wilke's art.

"Rhetoric as Canon" is a revision of a paper with the same title delivered on the "Open Session" panel at the 1991 College Art Association Conference in Washington, D.C. Many thanks to the panel's moderator, Mary D. Garrard, for her comments and suggestions, which strengthened the paper for presentation.

A version of this chapter appeared in the New Art Examiner 18 (June/Summer 1991). That material is reprinted by permission of the New Art Examiner.

1. Joanna Frueh, "Desert City" (unpublished novel, 1988), 1.

2. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), x.

3. Roszika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 45-48, and Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 17.

4. Patricia Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 39, writes that in poetry a word may serve "as vector, as harbinger of an abnormal way of thinking."

5. Margaret Miles's term "carnal knowing" is relevant to thinking about body/mind unity. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 8-9, writes, "'Carnal knowing' refers to an activity in which the intimate interdependence and irreducible cooperation of thinking, feeling, sensing, and understanding is revealed. . . . The consanguinity of human beings depends on mutual recognition of the common bond of a sentient body, whose most vivid experiences create consciousness."

6. Adapted from Frueh, "Desert City," 6-7.

7. I use Margaret Miles's term.

8. Adapted from Frueh, "Desert City," 16-17.

9. "Terrorist text," "abnormal discourse," and "ecstatic espionage" are phrases and ideas that recur throughout Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women .

10. See Yaeger, Honey-Mad Women , especially chapter 1.

"Jeez Louise" has been delivered at:

Louise Bourgeois colloquium in conjunction with Louise Bourgeois exhibition, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, October 1988
ARC Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, November 1988
Centenary College, Shreveport, Louisiana, October 1989
Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, November 1990

1. Ruth Meyer, "Introduction," in Louise Bourgeois , exhibition catalogue (Cincinnati: Taft Museum, 1987), unpaginated.

2. Smart Morgan, "Nature Study," in Louise Bourgeois , exhibition catalogue (Cincinnati: Taft Museum, 1987), unpaginated.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. William Rubin, "Foreword," in Deborah Wye, Louise Bourgeois , exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 11.

6. Deborah Wye, "Louise Bourgeois: 'One and Others,'" in Deborah Wye, Louise Bourgeois , exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982), 13.

7. Ibid., 29.

8. Ibid., 33.

9. Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Wye, "Louise Bourgeois," 67.

10. Russell Dudley, letters to Joanna Frueh, 1988.

11. I play with the Troggs's "Wild Thing," Wild Thing , Atco 33193.

12. Arlene Raven, "h a r m o n i e s: Harmony Hammond," in Arlene Raven, Crossing Over: Feminism and Art of Social Change (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1988), 33. Originally "h a r m o n i e s," pamphlet (Chicago: Klein Gallery, 1982).

13. Dudley, letters.

14. Donald Kuspit, "Louise Bourgeois: Where Angels Fear to Tread," Artforum 25 (March 1987): 119.

15. Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Wye, "Louise Bourgeois," 75.

16. Endpapers by Louise Bourgeois, in Louise Bourgeois (New York: Bellport, 1986).

17. Morgan, "Nature Study," unpaginated.

18. Dudley, letters.

19. Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Wye, "Louise Bourgeois," 25.

20. Robert Storr, "Louise Bourgeois: Gender and Possession," Art in America 71 (April 1983): 135.

21. Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Lucy R. Lippard, "Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out," Artforum 13 (March 1975): 31.

22. Dudley, letters.

23. Wye, "Louise Bourgeois," 33.

24. Louise Bourgeois, quoted in Wye, "Louise Bourgeois," 95.

25. Ibid., 72.

26. Stuart Morgan, "Lair," in Louise Bourgeois , exhibition catalogue (Cincinnati: Taft Museum, 1987), unpaginated.

27. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "The Woodspurge," in Jerome H. Buckley, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 67.

28. Ibid.

29. Jerry Gorovoy, "Louise Bourgeois and the Nature of Abstraction," in Louise Bourgeois (New York: Bellport, 1986), unpaginated.

30. Dudley, letters.

"Pythia" has been performed at:

Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts, Reno, Nevada, March 1994, as part of Daring Explorations Theater Company'c programming
Southwest Society of Photographic Education Conference, Tucson, Arizona, October 1994

1. Leonard Cohen, "Bird on a Wire," Songs from a Room , Columbia CS-9767.

2. I've incorporated lyrics from Johnny Cash, "Ring of Fire," Ring of Fire , Columbia cs-8853, and Peggy Lee, "Fever," Capitol 3998.

3. I have altered Lawrence S. Wrightman and Saul M. Kassan, Confessions in the Courtroom (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993), 60-61.

4. Cyndi Lauper, "True Colors," True Colors , Columbia 40313.

5. Elvis Presley, "Don't Be Cruel," Elvis' Golden Records , RCA LPM-1701

6. I've incorporated the title of Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly," Little Richard , Camden CAL-420.

7. Norma Lorre Goodrich, Priestesses (New York: Harper, 1990), 204, quotes Strabo: "My source Ephorus recounts the history of Delphi this way: Apollo conquered the Pythia because he wanted the oracle for men only, because men (more than women) need to be taught gentility and self-control."

8. George Thorogood, "Bad to the Bone," Bad to the Bone , EMI 17076.