Cruising the Dead River
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€112.99
1970s
A01=Fiona Anderson
art
Author_Fiona Anderson
blight
Category=AGA
Category=JBCC
Category=JBSJ
cemetery
conservation
cruising
David Wojnarowicz
derelict
environmentalism
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
film
gay
ghosts
history
homosexuality
hudson
journal entries
lgbtq
manhattan
marginalized
neighborhood
new york
nostalgia
photographs
piers
poetry
preservation
protest
queer
river
ruins
sexuality
space
urban life
visual culture
warehouses
waterfront
Product details
- ISBN 9780226603612
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 20 Aug 2019
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In the 1970s, Manhattan’s west side waterfront was a forgotten zone of abandoned warehouses and piers. Though many saw only blight, the derelict neighborhood was alive with queer people forging new intimacies through cruising. Alongside the piers’ sexual and social worlds, artists produced work attesting to the radical transformations taking place in New York. Artist and writer David Wojnarowicz was right in the heart of it, documenting his experiences in journal entries, poems, photographs, films, and large-scale, site-specific projects. In Cruising the Dead River, Fiona Anderson draws on Wojnarowicz’s work to explore the key role the abandoned landscape played in this explosion of queer culture. Anderson examines how the riverfront’s ruined buildings assumed a powerful erotic role and gave the area a distinct identity. By telling the story of the piers as gentrification swept New York and before the AIDS crisis, Anderson unearths the buried histories of violence, regeneration, and LGBTQ activism that developed in and around the cruising scene.
Fiona Anderson is lecturer in art history in the fine art department at Newcastle University.
