ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

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.

REVIEWS

"A truly remarkable work whose body exceeds any terms by which we might seek to constrain it. In their autotheoretical dialogue, and practice of merging, Florêncio and Rosenfeld tremble at the edges of various spaces, bodies, identities, desires, and temporalities, revealing in the process the pleasures and potentialities of erotic life in—or as—the ruins. Less a book than a constellation illuminating eroticism otherwise, Crossings invites us to remake the social by trusting what cruising may one day do."— Sarah Ensor, author of Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World

"Here is queer theory once again at the avant garde of sex, a supple crossing and blurring of two eloquent voices that edge the reader towards new plateaus of experience and pleasure. For any who fear that cruising has been gentrified, policed, or digitized out of existence, Crossings is here to disabuse you. With frank perversity, this highly original text is a highway to the danger zone. Once there, you may never want to come back."— Tavia Nyong'o, author of Black Apocalypse: Afrofuturism at the End of the World

"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

"Crossings is a rapturous testament to queer cruising and its potentialities for sex, friendship, and politics. As they entangle, throb, drip, and spread, Florêncio and Rosenfeld offer a queer theory that is devoted to pleasure and love in the ruins of empire. Tender and intimate, horny and explicit, this book chronicles bodies that open, breathe in, and submit to the transformative powers of cruising as a practice of queer living. How could you not want to join in?"— Zach Blas, assistant professor of visual studies at University of Toronto

"Crossings is a thrilling, erudite study of cruising's pluralities, a deeply thought and deeply felt tribute to tricks, strangers, and lovers. Florêncio and Rosenfeld breathe life into the mutable history of their subject, their collective eye trained on the body in states of ecstasy, vulnerability, transition, and performance. Through an intimate dialogue between voices, this book left gaping my idea of sex and what it might yet be."— Jack Parlett, author of The Poetics of Cruising: Queer Visual Culture from Whitman to Grindr

"Like the best experiences of cruising, this deliciously slutty, smutty book brings together two bodies alert and aroused to each other and generates a sticky and satisfying mess of anecdotes, insights, and revelations. Poetic and smart, raw and intelligent, filthy and sharp—this is a book that makes you want to head out and get your knees dirty."— Glyn Davis, professor of film studies at University of St. Andrews, Scotland

"Florêncio and Rosenfeld share much of themselves in this lingering, wise, and enthralling analysis of the transformational potentials of cruising. Running through this dual memoir of temporary intimacies and their enduring impacts is a generous theory in the form of a colloquy—both intellectual and personal—about sex, gender, and finding oneself among others."— David J. Getsy, author of Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art

TABLE OF CONTENTS