Karen Tongson

In the '60s and '70s, America's music scene was marked by raucous excess, reflected in the tragic overdoses of young superstars such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. At the same time, the uplifting harmonies and sunny lyrics that propelled Karen Carpenter and her brother, Richard, to international fame belied a different sort of tragedy—the underconsumption that led to Karen's death at age thirty-two from the effects of an eating disorder. In Why Karen Carpenter Matters, Karen Tongson (whose Filipino musician parents named her after the pop icon) interweaves the story of the singer’s rise to fame with her own trans-Pacific journey between Manila—where imitations of American pop styles flourished—and Karen Carpenter’s home ground of Southern California. Tongson reveals why the Carpenters' chart-topping, seemingly whitewashed musical fantasies of "normal love" can now have profound significance for her—as well as for other people of color, LGBT+ communities, and anyone outside the mainstream culture usually associated with Karen Carpenter’s legacy. This hybrid of memoir and biography excavates the destructive perfectionism at the root of the Carpenters’ sound, while finding the beauty in the singer's flawed, all too brief life.

Why Karen Carpenter Matters

An irreverent look at the love-hate relationship between queer viewers and mainstream family TV shows like Gilmore Girls and This Is Us After personal loss, political upheaval, and the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us craved a return to business as usual, the mundane, the middlebrow. We turned to TV to find these things. For nearly forty years, network television has produced a constant stream of “cry-along” sentimental-realist dramedies designed to appeal to liberal, heterosexual, white America. But what makes us keep watching, even though these TV series inevitably fail to reflect who we are? Revisiting soothing network dramedies like Parenthood,Gilmore Girls, This Is Us, and their late-80s precursor, thirtysomething, Normporn mines the nuanced pleasures and attraction-repulsion queer viewers experience watching liberal family-centric shows. Karen Tongson reflects on how queer cultural observers work through repeated declarations of a “new normal” and flash lifestyle trends like “normcore,” even as the absurdity, aberrance, and violence of our culture intensifies. Normporn allows us to process how the intimate traumas of everyday life depicted on certain TV shows—of love, life, death, and loss—are linked to the collective and historical traumas of their contemporary moments, from financial recessions and political crises to the pandemic. Normporn asks, what are queers to do—what is anyone to do, really—when we are forced to confront the fact of our own normalcy, and our own privilege, inherited or attained? The fantasies, the utopian impulses, and (paradoxically) the unreality of sentimental realist TV drama creates a productive tension that queer spectators in particular take pleasure in, even as—or precisely because—it lulls us into a sense of boredom and stability that we never thought we could want or have. .

Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us

Normporn

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 nowherespaces to survey our spatial imaginaries: the aesthetic, creative and popular materials of the new suburbia.

Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Relocations

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.

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century,African Americans made up approximately twelve percent ofthe United States population but close to forty percent of the United States prison population. Now, in the latter half of the decade, the nation is in the midst of the largest multi-year discharge of prisoners in its history. In Releasing Prisoners, Redeeming Communities, Anthony C. Thompson discusses what is likely to happen to these ex-offenders and why. For Thompson, any discussion of ex-offender reentry is, de facto, a question of race. After laying out the statistics, he identifies the ways in which media and politics have contributed to the problem, especially through stereotyping and racial bias. Well aware of the potential consequences if this country fails to act, Thompson offers concrete, realizable ideas of how our policies could, and should, change.

Karen Tongson

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