Backward Glances
Cruising Queer Streets in London and New York
Distribution by the University of Chicago Press only to customers in the USA and Canada. Customers elsewhere should visit the UK website of Reaktion Books.
Distributed for Reaktion Books
224 pages
|
6.15 x 9.25
Backward Glances is an exploration of the history of male street cruising. Too often in discussions of urban space and interpretations of urban culture, streetwalking implies a rigid model for the way we inhabit the streets. Beginning with the simple premise that we all walk the streets differently, Mark Turner suggests that male cruising operates through encounter and connection rather than alienation, and that it is the defining experience of what it means to be modern.
Backward Glances is the first gay urban history of its kind, examining these issues across a range of cultural material, including novels, poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings, the internet, and fragments of writing about the city such as Whitman's notebooks and David Hockney's graffiti. It provides a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the streets of the modern Western city.
Backward Glances is aimed at all those interested in the culture of the city, queer cultural history and the appropriation of public space.
Backward Glances is the first gay urban history of its kind, examining these issues across a range of cultural material, including novels, poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings, the internet, and fragments of writing about the city such as Whitman's notebooks and David Hockney's graffiti. It provides a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the streets of the modern Western city.
Backward Glances is aimed at all those interested in the culture of the city, queer cultural history and the appropriation of public space.
"Backward Glances compels us to rehtink how we understand both ways of being n the city and what makes cities sexy. . . . [It] challenges us to think about the erotics of the city, and the relationship between social formation and subject formation more generally."--Cultural Geographies
"It is the first gay urban history of its kind and examines issues across a range of cultural material, including poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings and the internet. . . . Mark Turner has put together a book that provides a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the streets of the modern Western City."--reFRESH
"Backward Glances is worthy of our attention, providing considerable insight into a largely invisible--and certainly a very lively--feature of the urban landscape."--Gay and Lesbian Review
"Backward Glances give us a glimpse of cruising in the good old, bad old days before screwing, for good or ill, became sanitised."--The List
Contents
Preface
1. Ambiguous Cities
2. Cruising Modernity
3. London: Mysteries of the Passers-by
4. New York: City of Orgies, Walks and Joys
5. Backward Glances at Whitman
Epilogue: Cruisingforsex
References
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Ambiguous Cities
2. Cruising Modernity
3. London: Mysteries of the Passers-by
4. New York: City of Orgies, Walks and Joys
5. Backward Glances at Whitman
Epilogue: Cruisingforsex
References
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
For more information, or to order this book, please visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu
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