Crossings

It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms. This book offers a serious exploration of queer sex and sex cultures, exploring cruising as a mode of thinking with the body and communicating through sexuality.    A creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences, Crossings takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. The result is an erotic hybrid form hovering between scholarship and avant-garde experimentation, between critical manifesto and sex memoir. Here, the voices of each author, merged together in one, invite the reader to inhabit the erotic spacetime between self and other, the familiar and the strange, desire and pleasure, climax and release. That is, the spaces and temporalities of cruising itself.

JOÃO FLORÊNCIO is professor of gender studies and chair of the sex media and sex cultures research area at LinkÖping University, Sweden. He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig.    LIZ ROSENFELD is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. Born New York City, they are based in Berlin. 

List of Illustrations xi Series Introduction by E. G. Crichton xiii Foreword: Fucking Archives by Grace Lavery xvii Introduction 1 1. Space 23 2. Time 49 3. Matter 73 4. Breath 97 Acknowledgments 117 Notes 119 Bibliography 131