For over 20 years, scholar and performance artist Joanna Frueh has been a pioneering force in feminist art and criticism. In homage to Frueh's “erotic scholarship,” Frueh's own writing and performances concerning relationships between women are interwoven with a biographical history of the author and the artist's own student/teacher relationship.

Joanna Frueh has developed her own contemporary ars erotica, in which seduction is both a persistent motif and performance strategy. Frueh has embodied numerous seductive personas, mirroring her own iterative process of self-transformation. The investigation of Frueh's “art of seduction” uncovers its relevance for her live performances since 1979.

Frueh's performance piece, The Aesthetics of Orgasm , begins with a primal scene — Frueh, as a child, walks in on her parents having sex. Weaving thinking into sex, orgasm, and the erotic, Frueh positions herself within feminist scholarship, performing language that enables a kind of heterosexual eroticism that does not objectify.

A philosophy of pleasure, a few chocolate malts, roses galore! In this performance text, Frueh is the Goddess of Roses, who observes and celebrates life through soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body.