We are thrilled to partner with the University of Manchester’s Centre for Sexuality Studies to welcome João Florêncio and Liz Rosenfeld to Blackwell’s to discuss their collaborative work, Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising.

Doors: 6.30pm, Starts: 6.45pm

Tickets are £4, or free when purchasing a copy of the book in advance.

About the 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.

About the Authors:

Liz Rosenfeld is a Berlin based visual and performance artist who works in film/video, performance, and experimental writing practice. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz’s work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, approaching questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Embracing an auto- theoretical style, Liz’s writing is rooted in questions that contend with how queer ontologies are grounded in variant hypocritical desire(s.)

João Florêncio is a professor at Linköping University in Sweden. His research draws from queer studies, media studies, visual culture and cultural studies to investigate the ways in which the queer body has been produced, policed, and contested as a political site of creative and affective sexual world-making in modern and contemporary sex cultures. He has published widely on sexual cultures, chemsex, techno and drug cultures, including the monograph ‘Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures: The Ethics of Becoming-Pig’ (2020).