Crossings
164 pages, 5 x 8
13 color and 4 B-W images
Paperback
Release Date:15 Apr 2025
ISBN:9781978837546
Hardcover
Release Date:15 Apr 2025
ISBN:9781978837553
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Crossings

Creative Ecologies of Cruising

SERIES: Q+ Public
Rutgers University Press
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.
Finally, a book about cruising that is actually about friendship—sex and sensibility, desire as gateway to more connection, more critical engagement, more dreaming. Yes, Crossings rescues cruising from the drudgery of hyper-individualist masculinist posturing, invoking the sweet caress of ruined bodies against policing in all its forms. Guidebook, ode, invocation, and creative intervention, it’s all here in this tender faggotry. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art
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, and 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. 
 
GRACE LAVERY is a writer and academic. She is the author of several books, including Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques.
List of Illustrations
Series Introduction by E. G. Crichton
Foreword: Fucking Archives, by Grace Lavery
Introduction
1    Space
2    Time
3    Matter
4    Breath
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
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