Dances of Time and Tenderness

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.＂

Julian Carter is associate professor of critical studies at the California College of the Arts. He is a critical historian and performance theorist whose work addresses normativity, embodiment, and the collective construction and maintenance of identity systems. He also makes social sculptures as Principle Instigator of the performance group PolySensorium. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1890-1940 (Duke University Press, 2007) and sits on the editorial board of the Trans Studies Quarterly. He lives in Mill Valley and Oakland, CA.