Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries 

What queer lives, loves and possibilities teem within suburbia’s little boxes? Moving beyond the imbedded urban/rural binary, Relocations offers the first major queer cultural study of sexuality, race and representation in the suburbs. Focusing on the region humorists have referred to as “Lesser Los Angeles”—a global prototype for sprawl—Karen Tongson weaves through suburbia’s “nowhere”spaces to survey our spatial imaginaries: the aesthetic, creative and popular materials of the new suburbia.

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.

Selected Reviews

"Relocations is luminous, hilarious, rigorous, and profoundly moving. Tongson turns the tables on the critical commonplace that the U.S. suburbs have been and will always be spaces of stultifying sameness."
—Scott Herring, International Journal of Communication

“Karen Tongson takes us on a wild ride to the hinterlands, the inner empires and the disturbing yet vital ‘burbs.’ She skillfully re-routes well-trodden tales of white flight and gay migration and deftly navigates the theoretical freeways to trace the emergence, lives and furtive affective and creative aspirations of queer of color cultures and communities in what have been long been considered the spatial edge of American social life. Relocations is fierce, eloquent and compelling.”
—Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

“Reading Relocations is akin to listening to a soundtrack of a favored movie from your teenage years, one whose details are perhaps forgotten, but the sound memory of which can take you, affectively, to another time, another world—to a different mode of being. With considerable style and expansive insight, Karen Tongson makes palpable the proliferation of queerness in such putatively normative sites as suburban Los Angeles. Thoroughly multi-disciplinary, theoretically savvy, archivally and methodologically innovative, this book is a lesson in how to cruise critically through the aesthetic, historic, personal, and political routes that connect places to persons and performances to identities, and present times to as yet unrealized elsewheres.”
—Kandice Chuh, author of Imagine Otherwise: on Asian Americanist Critique

"Relocations makes powerful contributions across queer, Asian American, Latin, American, and suburban studies, cultural geography, and scholarship on affect and sound, and should be a must-read for scholars interested in Los Angeles, empire, suburbia, gentrification, music, sexuality and space, or queer of color critique. It is also a simply exhilarating read, at once rich in its theoretical considerations and refreshingly lucid."
— David Seitz, The Journal of Emotion, Space and Society

"Relocations offers many elegant and playful challenges to [the] logic [of] queer spatial imaginaries [which are] thought through an urban/rural binary."
—Society and Space

"Tongson forwards novel and powerfully interwoven interventions into queer studies’ metronormativity, the suburbs’ white heteronormative ethos, and the neoliberal and imperialist complicities that undergird not only suburban queers’ subordination but also their agency." 
—GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

“Tongson’s counter-archive— willed into coherence by the fact that it is an archive she lived in and through—demonstrates that Southern California is not just the freeway but the ride, and what’s playing on the radio; not just the theme park, but its dance floor and what the DJ’s spinning; not just the ranch house, but the party in the backyard, and in whose arms you find yourself.”  
—Postmodern Culture

"This is provocative and works well, in particular Tongson’s risk-taking with regard to formal structure and narrative voice [...] Tongson’s style is adamantly interrogative and personal."
—Oxford Journal

Karen Tongson is the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press). Her writing and cultural commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, NPR, The Washington Post, and Public Books, as well as in the academic journals, Public Culture, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, and Nineteenth-Century Literatu

Karen Tongson is the author of Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (NYU Press). Her writing and cultural commentary has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, NPR, The Washington Post, and Public Books, as well as in the academic journals, Public Culture, Social Text, GLQ, American Quarterly, and Nineteenth-Century Literature, among other public and scholarly venues. 

She has a forthcoming book with ForeEdge Press on Why Karen Carpenter Matters, and has two books in progress: Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Aesthetics and Queer Theory (Duke University Press) and NORMPORN: Queer TV Spectatorship after the "New Normalcy."

Postmillennial Pop, the award-winning book series she co-edits with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press, has published over a dozen titles. You can also hear Karen talk about pop culture, the arts and entertainment on the weekly Pop Rocket Podcast, hosted by comedian Guy Branum. 

[Karen teaches courses, and delivers lectures nationally and internationally on race, gender and sexuality studies in popular culture; on literature and critical theory; on karaoke scenes and technologies; on Los Angeles, the Southern California region, and the Pacific Rim; and on contemporary food cultures.] I put this in brackets in case you want to move this excerpt into a description paragraph for the “Upcoming and Recent Appearances” section of the website.

She joined the USC faculty in fall 2005 after receiving her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. Before coming to USC, Tongson held a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego, and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at UC Irvine. 

Born in Manila, Philippines to one of the nation's founding families of Latin jazz—the Katindig clan—Karen immigrated to the U.S in the early 1980s and became a U.S. citizen in 1989. She lives in Los Angeles and is married to media scholar and TV columnist, Sarah Kessler. They have two cats. 

re, among other public and scholarly venues. 

She has a forthcoming book with ForeEdge Press on Why Karen Carpenter Matters, and has two books in progress: Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Aesthetics and Queer Theory (Duke University Press) and NORMPORN: Queer TV Spectatorship after the "New Normalcy."

Postmillennial Pop, the award-winning book series she co-edits with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press, has published over a dozen titles. You can also hear Karen talk about pop culture, the arts and entertainment on the weekly Pop Rocket Podcast, hosted by comedian Guy Branum.