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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 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.”
Dances of Time and Tenderness is a bold, sensual account of what Julian Carter calls “the trans 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.”
- GenresMemoirQueerTransgender
149 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 4, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 20, 2024
“Increasingly I feel myself as a repository, a safe deposit, holding his memories for him as he puts them down.”
A perfectly crafted and paced book-and a deliciously, moving read. Intellect unparalleled. Read it!
A perfectly crafted and paced book-and a deliciously, moving read. Intellect unparalleled. Read it!
Read
June 11, 2024Degenerate we linger
repeating for the music of it
taste, oh taste
green figs
and futures without arrival
I love it when a book gets me thinking what can be done within the cultural context where I live, and this one's done exactly that and even more. I'm not rating a memoir though, it feels like rating someone's life and I'm not about to do that (except for white cishet men's lives, those deserve a zero).
repeating for the music of it
taste, oh taste
green figs
and futures without arrival
I love it when a book gets me thinking what can be done within the cultural context where I live, and this one's done exactly that and even more. I'm not rating a memoir though, it feels like rating someone's life and I'm not about to do that (except for white cishet men's lives, those deserve a zero).
Read
July 3, 2024My essay on this book is up now at Poetry Foundation: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...
Here's an excerpt:
In his new book Dances of Time and Tenderness (Nightboat, 2024), the movement artist and historian Julian Carter repeatedly defines the project by what it is not. “This is not a book, it’s a series of swoons.” And: “this is not an autobiography, it’s an analysis of power.” Not memoir, lecture, or confession, but “call to arms,” “lifeline,” “choreographic analysis.” Rifling through and rejecting more familiar categories, Dances rearticulates itself in terms that keep changing. And truly, how could any category contain this work that seems to bend and breathe as we read it?
Dances of Time and Tenderness is Carter’s second book after The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940, an academic monograph published in 2007. Dances fuses Carter’s two fields: history and movement practice. “We stitch patterns with our feet,” the new book begins. “Approach and avoidance, arrival and retreat . . . We move . . . against the flows of normal time.” Melding autobiographical prose with poetry, parables, and performance text, personal history with archival research and gossip, Dances is a hybrid that could be called autotheory. The book fits into a counter-tradition of queer and trans personal writing that emphasizes the communal. I’m thinking of T Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing A Body Moves Through (2019), McKenzie Wark’s Raving (2023), and Robert Glück’s About Ed (2023), as well as New Narrative and its descendants more broadly. Dances is many things, yes, but most consistently it’s a collective history—one that does its thinking by moving.
Here's an excerpt:
In his new book Dances of Time and Tenderness (Nightboat, 2024), the movement artist and historian Julian Carter repeatedly defines the project by what it is not. “This is not a book, it’s a series of swoons.” And: “this is not an autobiography, it’s an analysis of power.” Not memoir, lecture, or confession, but “call to arms,” “lifeline,” “choreographic analysis.” Rifling through and rejecting more familiar categories, Dances rearticulates itself in terms that keep changing. And truly, how could any category contain this work that seems to bend and breathe as we read it?
Dances of Time and Tenderness is Carter’s second book after The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940, an academic monograph published in 2007. Dances fuses Carter’s two fields: history and movement practice. “We stitch patterns with our feet,” the new book begins. “Approach and avoidance, arrival and retreat . . . We move . . . against the flows of normal time.” Melding autobiographical prose with poetry, parables, and performance text, personal history with archival research and gossip, Dances is a hybrid that could be called autotheory. The book fits into a counter-tradition of queer and trans personal writing that emphasizes the communal. I’m thinking of T Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing A Body Moves Through (2019), McKenzie Wark’s Raving (2023), and Robert Glück’s About Ed (2023), as well as New Narrative and its descendants more broadly. Dances is many things, yes, but most consistently it’s a collective history—one that does its thinking by moving.
January 10, 2025
i always deeply cherish and enjoy trans queer histories and poetics, especially trans bay area narratives from older generations. this project felt a bit unwieldy at times and perhaps trying to accomplish too much in terms of style and content. the chain was a nice way to frame the different pieces, yet the lack of a real autobiographical/historical/theoretical throughline meant that carter's voice was lost in metaphor at times. still, this book has some really great language moments and valuable historical/creative research
June 24, 2024
Dr. Carter wrote an excellent book in 2007 entitled, "The Heart of Whiteness." I was disappointed that this book did not employ the same level of rigorous analysis.
The beginning of the book is bogged down by awful metaphors:
*Stickers are "visual pheromones." Is vision not sufficient? Do we really need to use a metaphor to add smell as an additional sense?
*Circuits, gates, and channels abound. There are "circuits flowing with gay power and feminist rage" and "gates that can snap abruptly shut or slip open." Ion channels, regulatory channels, second-hand stockings made of channels, channels for adventure, channels in anatomy, it's such a simple metaphor and so overused that it loses all effectiveness.
*Charged particles are used to describe attraction, but the science is wrong. Edward is a "charged particle yearning to connect across boundaries of gender and desire." All queer people seem to be charged particles, but if they're all the same charge, they would repel and not attract each other.
*There are multiple skin metaphors that are grouped as if it was a cohesive concept, but it's not. "Shear[ing] skin to let these stories through" is not the same as "skin in the game."
Then all the metaphors are mixed together in excruciating ways:
*"Skin wants to open. You can teach an asshole to relax and a cut to spread." It seems skin is used to let the light in, but also a channel to obtain access.
*"Eyes receive light as information; skin handles electrical knowledge." Skin isn't just cut, it's also a conduit for electrons.
*I could write an entire essay on how the links, ropes, and anchors are misused.
The rest of the book is an interweaving of history, personal experience, and poetry. It's so close in form to Maggie Nelson's writing that I'm surprised the author felt the need to snark on "gendernaut[s]." Frankly, "The Argonauts" is far better than this book.
This review may sound overly critical, but it's because I know the author is capable of incredible writing. The book is worth reading solely for the discussion of crawling as applied to degradation, effeminacy, and Pope.L's performance art. The section on Julie Tolentino's performance art is also riveting. Despite the flaws in this book, I still hope there will be a next one.
The beginning of the book is bogged down by awful metaphors:
*Stickers are "visual pheromones." Is vision not sufficient? Do we really need to use a metaphor to add smell as an additional sense?
*Circuits, gates, and channels abound. There are "circuits flowing with gay power and feminist rage" and "gates that can snap abruptly shut or slip open." Ion channels, regulatory channels, second-hand stockings made of channels, channels for adventure, channels in anatomy, it's such a simple metaphor and so overused that it loses all effectiveness.
*Charged particles are used to describe attraction, but the science is wrong. Edward is a "charged particle yearning to connect across boundaries of gender and desire." All queer people seem to be charged particles, but if they're all the same charge, they would repel and not attract each other.
*There are multiple skin metaphors that are grouped as if it was a cohesive concept, but it's not. "Shear[ing] skin to let these stories through" is not the same as "skin in the game."
Then all the metaphors are mixed together in excruciating ways:
*"Skin wants to open. You can teach an asshole to relax and a cut to spread." It seems skin is used to let the light in, but also a channel to obtain access.
*"Eyes receive light as information; skin handles electrical knowledge." Skin isn't just cut, it's also a conduit for electrons.
*I could write an entire essay on how the links, ropes, and anchors are misused.
The rest of the book is an interweaving of history, personal experience, and poetry. It's so close in form to Maggie Nelson's writing that I'm surprised the author felt the need to snark on "gendernaut[s]." Frankly, "The Argonauts" is far better than this book.
This review may sound overly critical, but it's because I know the author is capable of incredible writing. The book is worth reading solely for the discussion of crawling as applied to degradation, effeminacy, and Pope.L's performance art. The section on Julie Tolentino's performance art is also riveting. Despite the flaws in this book, I still hope there will be a next one.
May 17, 2024
In 2016 Julian Carter, a queer author and long-time participant in San Francisco's dungeon kink scene, received an invitation to be part of an archival matchmaking project. The project paired artists, activists, and scholars with specific issues of OUT/LOOK: The National Lesbian and Gay Quarterly. The assignment was to use the issue as a jumping off point to think about queer history and make something "new and provocative." Carter's assigned issue was from Winter 1991, the year the CDC announced 1 million American were HIV positive and AIDS was the 3rd leading cause of death in people aged 25-44 years. One of the many who died in 1991 due to AIDS related complications was Lou Sullivan, one of the first trans men to publicly identify as gay. From this starting point, this book traces paths of queer lineage, both proclaimed and obscured, traveling through history, memory, and poetry. Carter is linked, through friendship or scholarship, to Susan Stryker, pioneer of transgender history, to Zach Ozma, who edited Lou Sullivan's diaries for publication, and to Lou himself. Casting a transgender eye back on a queer history divided sharply into gay and lesbian, Carter allows himself to claim as ancestors sailors, skeletons, writers, lovers, and reaches forward in time towards students, readers, and artists. Including me. I was fortunate enough to be gifted an early copy by the author, and read it back in February back in one delicious rush. I already want to read it again, and more slowly, this time underlining and annotating it. This is a book to savor, but is easy to devour instead. It's sensual and surprising, formally precise, and made me want to dig around in a mess of queer historical papers and also contribute my own to the pile. It's out on June 4, 2024; give it a pre-order or look for it on shelves soon!
February 5, 2025
Hoo boy there’s some trans/queer stuff out there that I think is just waiting for people to stumble on it and have their lives changed and this is one example.
Has killer lines and moments and also so much variety even while all the parts complement each other so well. Some of the most beautiful writing about trancestry I have ever read. And, even putting the content aside, the form and structure of this book are so trans and so queer to me. Really endlessly inventive and rich stuff — honestly I’m looking at what a book can be differently after reading this.
Pay extra attention if you like or interested in: Lou Sullivan’s diaries, Stone Butch Blues, The Freezer Door, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Sarah Schulman’s history of ACT UP NYC, Funeral Parade of Roses (which is a movie while everything else I’ve listed is a book), probably Close to the Knives though I haven’t read that yet. And more generally: erotic/kink/queer desire stuff, writing/art that mixes/defies genre, trans history, the AIDS epidemic and queer loss/activism.
Has killer lines and moments and also so much variety even while all the parts complement each other so well. Some of the most beautiful writing about trancestry I have ever read. And, even putting the content aside, the form and structure of this book are so trans and so queer to me. Really endlessly inventive and rich stuff — honestly I’m looking at what a book can be differently after reading this.
Pay extra attention if you like or interested in: Lou Sullivan’s diaries, Stone Butch Blues, The Freezer Door, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Sarah Schulman’s history of ACT UP NYC, Funeral Parade of Roses (which is a movie while everything else I’ve listed is a book), probably Close to the Knives though I haven’t read that yet. And more generally: erotic/kink/queer desire stuff, writing/art that mixes/defies genre, trans history, the AIDS epidemic and queer loss/activism.
August 25, 2024
queer autotheory summer continues! through visits to archives and conversations with ghosts and many many (too many?) chain metaphors, this book showed me new ways to think about how our bodies are made and how we might remake them. bonus was i learned a lot about AIDs activism. overall not my favorite but it was a quick read and the book revolves around a very seductive and exciting “trans promise” that “what we do with our bodies changes worlds.” i read this book with my body and who knows what i will do with it next!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews