The erotic and the intellectual come together to create a new kind of criticism in the lushly written work of Joanna Frueh. Addressing sexuality in ways that are usually hidden or left unsaid, Frueh—a noted performance artist and art historian—explores subjects such as aging, beauty, love, sex, pleasure, contemporary art, and the body as a site and vehicle of knowledge. Frueh's language is explicit, graphic, fragmented. She assumes multiple voices: those of lover, prophet, daughter, mythmaker, art critic, activist, and bleeding heart. What results is an utterly original narrative that frees us from the false objectivity of traditional critical discourse and affirms the erotic as a way to ease human suffering. Through personal reflection, parody, autobiography, and poetry, Frueh shows us what it means to perform criticism, to personalize critical thinking. Rejecting postmodern, deconstructed prose, she recuperates the sentimental, proudly asserts a romantic viewpoint, and disrupts academic and feminist conventions. Erotic Faculties seeks to free the power of our unutilized erotic faculties and to expand the possibilities of criticism; it is a wild ride and a consummate pleasure. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996.

This book steers black sexual politics toward a more sex-positive trajectory, navigating the uncharted spaces where social constructionism, third-wave feminism, and black popular culture collide to locate a new site for sexuality studies that is theoretically innovative, politically subversive, and stylistically chic.

Linda S. Kauffman turns the pornography debate on its head with this audacious analysis of recent taboo-shattering fiction, film, and performance art. Investigating the role of fantasy in art, politics, and popular culture, she shows how technological advances in medicine and science (magnetic resonance imaging, computers, and telecommunications) have profoundly altered our concepts of the human body. Cyberspace is producing new forms of identity and subjectivity. The novelists, filmmakers, and performers in Bad Girls and Sick Boys are the interpreters of these brave new worlds, cartographers who are busy mapping the fin-de-millennium environment that already envelops us. Bad Girls and Sick Boys offers a vital and entertaining tour of the current cultural landscape. Kauffman boldly connects the dots between the radical artists who shatter taboos and challenge legal and aesthetic conventions. She links writers like John Hawkes and Robert Coover to Kathy Acker and William Vollmann; filmmakers like Ngozi Onwurah and Isaac Julien to Brian De Palma and Gus Van Sant; and performers like Carolee Schneemann and Annie Sprinkle to the visual arts. Kauffman's lively interviews with J. G. Ballard, David Cronenberg, Bob Flanagan, and Orlan add an extraordinary dimension to her timely and convincing argument.

A feminist pioneer, writer, and patron of the arts and literature in Buenos Aires, Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979) was a larger-than-life personality of legendary vitality. A key protagonist in Argentina’s rise to world-class status in the arts and sciences, Ocampo leveraged her wealth and social status to found Sur (1931–92), the internationally influential journal of literature, culture, and ideas. Ocampo personally invited many intellectual and artistic celebrities to visit Buenos Aires. Most were men. Some, endowed with egos as outsized as their reputations, tripped and fell into sentimental imbroglios with the strong-willed and beautiful Ocampo. In Free Women in the Pampas the ups and downs of her passionate friendships, debates, and misunderstandings with poet Rabindranath Tagore, philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and the writers Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle, Hermann von Keyserling, and Waldo Frank are witnessed by the fictional Carmen Brey, a Galician-Spanish immigrant whose story is skilfully interwoven with that of Ocampo. Carmen’s sympathetic but incisive gaze puts her friend Victoria into perspective against a larger vision of Argentina. Carmen’s adventures lead her to social-justice writer María Rosa Oliver, the wilder side of the 1920s literary avant-garde (and the now-canonical authors Roberto Arlt, Jorge Luis Borges, and Leopoldo Marechal), the Mapuche people of the pampa, and a ten-year-old Evita Ibarguren, later famous as Eva Perón. Against this broad, inclusive backdrop, the novel vividly depicts Victoria Ocampo’s struggle with the strictures of class and gender to find her own voice and vocation as a public intellectual.

This volume deals with the enduring presence of one of Western culture's most fascinating and influential figures in ancient, modern, and postmodern art and literature: Venus/Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality. The collection, which is the first of its kind, seeks to explore Venus's significance as a figure of beauty and creativity across cultures and disciplines, engaging a range of media, theoretical approaches, and cultural perspectives. Thirteen international scholars—including Elisabeth Bronfen, Tom Conley, Laurence Rickels, and Barbara Vinken—illuminate Venus's lasting value as a multifaceted figure of the creative in Western culture, from Lucretius to Michel Serres.

A prolific scholar surveys classical Buddhism’s approach to sex, gender, and sexual orientation in this landmark volume. More than twenty-five years in the making, this detailed sourcebook on Buddhist understandings of sexuality, desire, ethics, and deviance in classical South Asia is filled with both engaging translations and original and provocative analysis. Jose Cabezon, the XIVth Dalai Lama Professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, marshals an incredible array of scriptures, legal and medical texts, and philosophical treatises, explaining the subtleties of this ancient literature in lucid prose. This work will be of immense interest not only to scholars of Buddhism and gender studies but also to lay readers who want to learn more about traditional Buddhist attitudes toward sex.

Presumed Incompetent is a pathbreaking account of the intersecting roles of race, gender, and class in the working lives of women faculty of color. Through personal narratives and qualitative empirical studies, more than 40 authors expose the daunting challenges faced by academic women of color as they navigate the often hostile terrain of higher education, including hiring, promotion, tenure, and relations with students, colleagues, and administrators. The narratives are filled with wit, wisdom, and concrete recommendations, and provide a window into the struggles of professional women in a racially stratified but increasingly multicultural America.

This issue explores the growing field of adult degree programs andconsiders the theoretical underpinnings of such programs andhands-on issues as curriculum, faculty, marketing, technology,financing, and accreditation, all with a goal of informing andequipping both scholars and practitioners. More and more adults who have been out of school for many yearshave turned to colleges and universities to complete undergraduateand graduate degrees that will make them competitive in theworkforce, fulfill a professional requirement, or enrich themintellectually. Higher education institutions and many privateorganizations have responded to this demand by creating innovativedegree programs aimed specifically at mature learners, students whowant to self-design their educational programs and do not hesitateto change institutions if they believe their needs are not beingmet. This explosive growth in adult degree programs is largely theresult of distance education technologies and the Internet. Othersignificant factors include the potential such programs have forproviding additional revenue streams for institutions, the fiercecompetition from the private sector and other higher educationinstitutions, and the rising interest in interdisciplinaryprograms. This is the 103rd volume of the Jossey-Bass quarterly reportseries New Directions for Adult and ContinuingEducation.

Feminist Perspectives on the Body provides an accessible introduction to this extremely popular new area and is aimed at students from a variety of disciplines who are interested in gaining an understanding of the key issues involved. The author explores many important topics including: the Western world's construction of the body as a theoretical, philosophical and political concept; the body and reproduction; medicalisation; cosmetic surgery and eating disorders; the body in performance; the private and the public body; working bodies and new ways of thinking about the body.

There are many varieties of procedures to assess criminal and sex offenders that have emerged throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. This book is an attempt to bridge that gap, to provide some historical background of sex offender assessment from 1830 to the present.