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Karen Tongson
Karen Tongson is Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at University of Southern California, and the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press, 2011). Her work has appeared in numerous academic and popular publications in print and online, including Public Culture, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, as well as the anthologies, Pop When the World Falls Apart (Duke), Queering the Popular Pitch (Routledge), and The Blackwell Companion to LGBTQ Studies. She is currently the book series editor for Postmillennial Pop at NYU Press, and associate editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. Her current book project, Empty Orchestra: Karaoke. Critical. Apparatus. critiques prevailing paradigms of imitation in contemporary aesthetics and critical theory, while offering a genealogy of karaoke technologies, techniques, and desires.
More about Karen Tongson:
http://www.amazon.com/Karen-Tongson/e/B004O5AXDQ
USC Faculty Bio:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1008230
More about Karen Tongson:
http://www.amazon.com/Karen-Tongson/e/B004O5AXDQ
USC Faculty Bio:
https://dornsife.usc.edu/cf/faculty-and-staff/faculty.cfm?pid=1008230
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On December 4, 2013, our dean of the brown commons, our unruly compass, our institutional ally, our comrade in chismis, our companion species, our friend, José Esteban Muñoz, died unexpectedly at the age of forty-six.
This space in American Quarterly is usually devoted to documenting events—to reviewing and rendering them for readers, audiences, and scholars who often can’t be there themselves. The “eventness” of this profound and searing loss, like most traumas, is one that cannot possibly be rendered. It cannot be reviewed, surveyed, or assessed. It can only resurface in sharp, fragmentary bursts of crippling sorrow or in the perpetual, steady struggle with realizing something we never wished to fathom. Thus what fills these pages, previously designated for “the event,” is a collection of impressions, poetry, and memories that we never wished to cohere in the wake of such “eventness”: one so catastrophic as to have been felt by everyone who knew José or his work. In effect, we were all there. We are all still in it.
From the Square (June 13, 2013)
Across southern California’s freeways, beneath its overpasses and just beyond its winding cloverleaf interchanges, Tongson explores the improvisational archives of queer suburban sociability, from multimedia artist Lynne Chan’s JJ Chinois projects and the amusement park night-clubs of 1980s Orange County to the imperial legacies of the region known as the Inland Empire. By taking a hard look at the cosmopolitanism historically considered de rigeur for queer subjects, while engaging with the so-called “New Suburbanism” that has captivated the national imaginary in everything from lifestyle trends to electoral politics, Relocations radically revises our sense of where to see and feel queer of color sociability, politics and desire.
On December 4, 2013, our dean of the brown commons, our unruly compass, our institutional ally, our comrade in chismis, our companion species, our friend, José Esteban Muñoz, died unexpectedly at the age of forty-six.
This space in American Quarterly is usually devoted to documenting events—to reviewing and rendering them for readers, audiences, and scholars who often can’t be there themselves. The “eventness” of this profound and searing loss, like most traumas, is one that cannot possibly be rendered. It cannot be reviewed, surveyed, or assessed. It can only resurface in sharp, fragmentary bursts of crippling sorrow or in the perpetual, steady struggle with realizing something we never wished to fathom. Thus what fills these pages, previously designated for “the event,” is a collection of impressions, poetry, and memories that we never wished to cohere in the wake of such “eventness”: one so catastrophic as to have been felt by everyone who knew José or his work. In effect, we were all there. We are all still in it.
From the Square (June 13, 2013)
Across southern California’s freeways, beneath its overpasses and just beyond its winding cloverleaf interchanges, Tongson explores the improvisational archives of queer suburban sociability, from multimedia artist Lynne Chan’s JJ Chinois projects and the amusement park night-clubs of 1980s Orange County to the imperial legacies of the region known as the Inland Empire. By taking a hard look at the cosmopolitanism historically considered de rigeur for queer subjects, while engaging with the so-called “New Suburbanism” that has captivated the national imaginary in everything from lifestyle trends to electoral politics, Relocations radically revises our sense of where to see and feel queer of color sociability, politics and desire.