Product Description

"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 premiss 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 grafitti. 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #352339 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Customer Reviews

Brilliant!
Dr. Mark Turner has brilliantly elucidated the manner in which cruising in the nineteenth century revealed the interstertial nature of power politics in the modern metropolis. I would recommend this book to anybody interested in urbanism, gender studies, and queer politics from Whitman and Wilde to Warhol.

a great read

Not so much a history of cruising
This book is more an essay, rather than a deep study of cruising, even the authors concept of what cruising is (I assume most readers would expect it to be gay men looking for sex) isn't cut and dried, this book concentrates on poetry (especially Walt Whitman) and other written material that could be INTERPRETED as studies on cruising, although his prime contender for 'poet of the gay cruiser' was a married man with six children.

If you are looking for a titillating, gay history of cruising, this is NOT the book for you. It is heavy going and academic. The title is deceptive, and you should not judge this book by it's (suggestive) cover.