Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A powerful account of art and activism during and after the AIDS crisis that hybridizes archive and the personal essay. "Every chain starts with a connection: one link meets another," Julian Carter writes, theorizing queer intimacy as a technology and texture of history. Dances of Time and Tenderness ranges from Neolithic barrow burials to 1990s San Francisco dungeons in a lyrical performance of what Carter calls "the trans promise: what we do with our bodies changes worlds." Carter's drawings of chains lace together tales of artists and activists, lovers and political formations, intergenerational lineages of queer thinkers, and trans historians like Lou Sullivan and Susan Stryker. We are invited to situate and resituate ourselves in communal formations--the gay bar, the classroom, the funeral--in a formally rigorous, gorgeously complex dance of rumors and fictions, art criticism, rage and sorrow, and passionately lived experience.
Synopsis
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 account of what Julian Carter calls "the trans promise: what we do with our bodies changes worlds." With delicate drawings of chains linking the dungeons of 1990s San Francisco to medieval catacombs, AIDS funerals, and Tennessee truckstops, Carter proposes intimacy as a technology of history. Here, historians and artists, students and lovers, sailors and skeletons join across deep time in a transgenderational lineage of queer carnality as culture, inviting us to enter a gorgeously complex, formally precise choreography of sweetness, rage and sorrow--"this is not a memoir, it's collective memory."