It’s difficult to pinpoint the origins of cruising. While the term was used by men seeking casual encounters with other men in the parks and streets of New York City as early as the 1920s, historical records show the practice is much older. Cruising has existed for as long as anyone outside the dominant sex and gender systems has sought sexual encounters outside of sanctioned norms.

Cruising Dialogues will bring together artist Liz Rosenfeld, photographer Christa Holka, and researcher João Florêncio to introduce and discuss their collaborations on and around the topic of cruising. The Queer@King's event will include a conversation about Rosenfeld and Holka’s collaborative visual works, and readings from Rosenfeld and Florêncio’s new book Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising (Rutgers University Press, 2025). The discussion will be chaired by Jamie Hakim (King's College London) and introduced by Zeena Feldman (King’s College London).

About the speakers

João Florêncio is Professor of Gender Studies (Sex Media and Sex Cultures) at Linköping University, Sweden. A queer cultural theorist of the body and sexuality, his research navigates the ways in which the desiring-body has been produced, policed, mediated, and contested as a site of creative world-making in modern and contemporary cultures. João currently leads the 4-year research project “The Europe that Gay Porn Built, 1945–2000,” a collaboration between Linköping University, the University of Exeter, and Birmingham City University. He is the author of Bareback Porn, Porous Masculinities, Queer Futures (Routledge, 2020) and, with Liz Rosenfeld, of Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

Christa Holka is a queer portrait and performance photographer who has been photographing their communities both intimate and extended for over 20 years. Christa is interested in documenting the everyday lives of people who wouldn’t ordinarily be documented thereby facilitating an experience of feeling seen through a photographic process. Holka’s practice’s main motivation is to promote, elevate and showcase the communities, organisations, events, art, artists, they photograph, with the intention of creating images in which people feel seen.

Liz Rosenfeld is a transdisciplinary artist who works with performance, moving images, drawing and experimental writing practices. Liz's work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, edging questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space.

Jamie Hakim is a lecturer in culture, media and creative industries. His research interests lie at the intersection of digital cultures, intimacy, embodiment and care. His books include Work That Body: Male Bodies in Digital Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) and Digital Intimacies: Queer Men and Smartphones in Times of Crisis (Bloomsbury, 2024). He was the recipient of the Stuart Hall Foundation X Cultural Studies Award 2020. As part of The Care Collective he has co-authored The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (Verso, 2020).

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