It's hard to think of a solo female recording artist who has been as
revered or as reviled over the course of her career as Tori Amos. Amy
Gentry argues that these violent aesthetic responses to Amos's
performance, both positive and negative, are organized around
disgust-the disgust that women are taught to feel, not only for their
own bodies, but for their taste in music. Released in 1996, Amos's third
album, Boys for Pele, represents the height of Amos's willingness to
explore the ugly qualities that make all of her music, even her more
conventionally beautiful albums, so uncomfortably, and so wonderfully,
strange. Using a blend of memoir, criticism, and aesthetic theory,
Gentry argues that the aesthetics of disgust are useful for thinking in
a broader way about women's experience of all art forms.