Dances of Time and Tenderness

Description
A cycle of stories linking queer memory, activism, death, and art in a transpoetic history of desire and touch.
Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual cycle of transpoetic stories that blend memory and movement in an innovative choreo-text of rage, sweetness and sorrow. A dance hall where the dead and the living meet, the tales take us from the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to the goldsmith's forges of the earliest cities, tracing a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality. Not a memoir, but a collective memory, Julian Carter invites us to join artists and AIDS activists, sailors and skeletons, to fulfill the trans promise: "what we do with our bodies changes worlds."
About this Author
Julian Carter has been thinking with his body for a very long time. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1890-1940 as well as numerous critical essays exploring how embodied identities are developed, communicated, contested, and lived in cultural productions ranging from vintage public health pamphlets to postmodern dance performance. He teaches at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Reviews
"Sexy and smart. Equal parts delicate and dynamic, Carter activates touch as mode of trans worldmaking. This book enacts an inter-generational praxis of intimacy and care, inviting us to form new erotic connections with our transcestors in the service of a world to come."
--Juana María Rodríguez
"Julian Carter has an eye for exquisite detail: a step, a glance, a footprint on a page--all enchained in lyric vignettes where queer and trans generations invite us to dance across the folds of time."
--Susan Stryker
"The chain Carter brings us into consists of intimacies, associations, and repetitions--the stuff that makes up history. . . a gorgeous invocation of queer community across genders, orientations, and time."
--Megan Milks, Harriet Books
"Lyrical, fervent ponderings on the intersection of queerness, art, eroticism, and history. . . Within this vibrant interwoven tapestry, the author has created a welcome cultural retrospective of LGBTQ+ life."
--Kirkus Reviews
"Smartly and elegantly, Carter's essay-poems begin in one place and end up in another, much like the notions of self and gender the book so playfully explores. . . smart, provocative, and entertaining."
--Dale Boyer, Gay and Lesbian Review
"Pirouetting between the past and present, fiction and memoir, and poetry and academic theory, Julian Carter's Dances of Time and Tenderness conjures a text rippling with queer potentiality. . . Roving in topic, Dances is animated by the politics that puts trans bodies--and their ability to change the world--at the forefront."
--Joshua Gutterman Tranen, Adroit
"In this all-genre (maybe anti-genre) book, Carter dances us along the dreamlike paths of life and communal myth through non-binary leather parties, neolithic burial grounds, long-demolished roadhouses, the feminist sex wars, and some shallows where we might catch frogs."
--Zach Ozma
"Julian Carter merges memories and reflections, interwoven pasts and archival imaginings, in an intimate history of queer and trans desire he draws by hand. This is a book I trust to etch a complex, collective remembrance on the page."
--Selby Wynn Schwartz
"[A] transpoetic story cycle linking art, death, and kinky sex, through which he partners readers in intimate encounters with trans/queer histories from Neolithic burials to coffee in present-day San Francisco."
--rob mclennan
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