- Paperback: 192 pages
- Publisher: Reaktion Books; illustrated edition edition (31 Oct 2003)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1861891806
- ISBN-13: 978-1861891808
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.8 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 489,102 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
... Backward Glances is worthy of our attention, providing considerable insight into a largely invisible - and certainly very lively - feature of the urban landscape. The Gay and Lesbian Review an intelligent take on cruising ... Turner suggests that male cruising operates through encounter and connection rather than alienation, and that this is the defining experience of modern life. It is the first gay urban history of its kind and examines issue across a range of cultural material, including poems, pornography, journalism, gay guides, paintings and the internet ... provides a new way of understanding what it means for a man to walk the streets of the modern western city. Refresh Backward Glances gives us a glimpse of cruising in the good old, bad old days before screwing, for good or ill, became sanitised. The List, Glasgow
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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
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
a great read
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Excellent
20 Mar 2004
Format:Paperback
A truly interesting, intelligent, and readable meditation on gay male culture from the mid 19th century to the present. Jargon-free, wide-ranging in its use of sources, and both sensitive and informed in its use of history. Turner takes on issues of great interest to anyone curious about queer history and theory, and he presents his ideas in a way that is enjoyable and informative. This scholarly and accessible book is almost the direct opposite of the leaden and incoherent prose being marketed by so many these days under the name of "queer theory."
6 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Academic and Drained of Sex
8 Dec 2004
Format:Paperback
In Backward Glances by Mark W. Turner, queer (a too lengthy discussion of why "queer" and not "gay" erupts in the middle of the book, which is a relief from the even lengthier discussion of a flaneur, by way of Baudelaire) cruising in the streets of New York and London is drained of sex. This is a fairly passionless treatise in general that is short on historical content but waist deep in literary references, although often not to cruising but to an examination of queering urban spaces in a far more general sense. The discussion on Walt Whitman is often inciteful and interesting but veers off topic as Whitman's influence on more recent gay artists is presented. This is a intelligent, academic, often dull piece that never brings the reader a sense of history as actual events take a backstage to literary and artistic representations.
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