The Affective Lives of Cruising: Recharting Space, Place, and Time

This article turns to cruising maps as sites in which normative conceptions of space, place, and time might be reimagined. The authors first examine a brief history of queer mapping practices, paying particular attention to how queer cruising maps challenge constructions of private and public life by charting veiled sexual publics obfuscated by subtle queer social codes. Then, paying particular attention to ephemera and affect, the authors investigate the ways these queer cruising maps are animated by economies of affective experiences and other queer ephemera—feelings, lingerings, barterings, passings, and potentialities. The authors then argue that such an affective experience reorients stabilized notions of space, place, and time. The article concludes with a meditation on the futures of cruising, reflecting on how queer social and sexual relations have been (re)shaped across time into the present moment. Through such a provocation, the authors seek to critically examine how queer sexual practices and counterpublics are mapped and remembered, and how their contours of belonging continue to be contested, opening potentials and possibilities for new queer futures.