Not just the freeway, but the ride and the radio

Contained in these boxes, little and large, are the unacknowledged urgencies, desires, and encounters meant to be kept out of these meticulously planned geographies: queers, immigrants, ‘gangstas,’ minimum-wagers, Others who find the notion of a ‘nuclear family’ as toxic as it sounds.

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Karen Tongson’s Relocations is an ambitious first book, with an admitted “propensity for sprawling out” (xiii): it deftly merges disparate elements of a diverse archive to describe wide-ranging forms of queer world-making in suburban Southern California. The book forges a two-fold critique that is long overdue. Tongson aims to correct two stubbornly persistent misconceptions that, despite ample evidence to the contrary, continue to frame both critical and popular discourses about cities and suburbs alike: the first is the idea that suburbs are sites of “racialized, classed, and sexualized homogeneity” (3); the second misconception is that the metropolis — especially New York City — is the privileged habitat for queer world-making. In this sense, Tongson joins Judith Halberstam and especially Scott Herring in forcing a fundamental reexamination of accepted narratives of sexuality and space, one that moves beyond the metropolis and the walkable city to take up post-pedestrian forms of urbanism.¹
 
Relocations makes this two-fold critique while also serving as a meditation on Tongson’s own relocation from Manila to Southern California in 1983, after a childhood spent with musician parents traveling through the Pacific rim. For Tongson, as for so many others, the suburbs of Southern California represent the signature landscape of the American Century. And while her text is far more than a case study of the so-called ethnoburbs, its narrative more than supports the conclusion that it is no longer the central city but the (older, first ring) suburbs that have become the primary destination for immigrants and migrants in the United States. If this is true for suburbs in general, Tongson suggests it is all the more so for Southern California, as she cites Gustavo Arellano: “Orange County is the Ellis Island of the twenty-first century” (83). In Tongson’s forceful description, the evident heterogeneity of suburbs past and present has not altered their idealized image as the exemplary setting for “American normativity” (20). Drawing especially from Catherine Jurca’s White Diaspora, Tongson suggests that the American suburban ideal persists largely as the result of a vast 20^th-century cultural archive—film, literature, and television—that portrays suburbia as both the promise and paradox of “American normativity.” As she describes, “bourgeois seclusion” in “the tidy confines of suburban domesticity” serves as “the prosperous white American’s most profound burden” (20). Against this normative framing, the core project of Relocations is to reveal a counter-archive of suburban cultural forms and practices produced by the suburbs’ less visible inhabitants: “queers, immigrants, ‘gangstas,’ minimum-wagers, Others who find the notion of a ‘nuclear family’ as toxic as it sounds” (1). And thus Relocations produces a “queer of color suburban archive” (27), the core thematic element of which is not the ennui of the suburban entitled, but rather the various modes of “making do” undertaken by “the relocated” (21).
 
We are introduced to this counter-archive in Tongson’s first chapter, and we learn that the archive of “the relocated” is as expansive as the landscapes it surveys, including strip malls, amusement parks, freeways, neighborhood culs-de-sacs, and agricultural wastelands. But in Tongson’s text, these landscapes of American normativity lose their generic hue and become newly specified as diversely-lived social spaces: the strip mall with a dim sum shop and Botánica, the tract house with the “customized, ornamental addition” (42). The range of materials that comprises this counter-archive is likewise expansive: interviews, municipal archives, blogs and bulletin boards, radio stations, DJs, soundscapes, personal memories, literature, performance art, fotonovelas, online diaries, site plans, urban visual culture. 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. Tongson provides not only a rich description of the sites and scenes of 80s Southern California, but also of its sounds—or more precisely its soundtrack. Song lyrics punctuate her paragraphs and pop rhythms structure the cadence of her prose in what Tongson describes as “a twisted form of critical karaoke,” a term she attributes to Joshua Clover (24). Indeed, popular music forms a core vector through which otherwise isolated queer subjects shape a collective social world, in a process Tongson designates “remote intimacy”—one of her central critical motifs (27). In multi-mediating her archive, Tongson joins Lynn Spiegel and too few others, who have investigated the full inter-imbrication of media and the built environment.² Tongson manages to hold in tension the centripetal force of her expansive archive and multiple critical questions in part by going with the flow. That is, she uses the cloverleaf of the freeway as a figure for the diverse vectors of her inquiry that “merge together before pulling apart toward different destinations” (161).
 
In her second chapter, Tongson turns to performance artist Lynne Chan, about whom Tongson first wrote in 2002, to elaborate and calibrate her critique of “queer metronormativity.” Here Tongson revises her own earlier reading of the “Bakersfield-born, Coalinga-raised, transgender superstar JJ Chinois” to reveal the ways this work challenges presumptions that have blinded queer scholarship—including her own—to forms of queer world-making as they take place outside the metropolis (20). Tongson spends time with George Chauncey’s paradigm-setting Gay New York (1995) and the “conceptual slippage” she sees in his text between descriptions of “gay New York” and “the gay world” (49). Tongson argues that Chauncey set a pattern for subsequent queer scholarship so that now-storied places and practices in New York have come to define the contours of gay aspiration and modes of queer inhabitation, as the “template for a national gay ethos and culture” (49). Tongson critiques the tendency within queer scholarship to regard as paradigmatic gay men’s experience of the metropolis, arguing that doing so not only under-attends to the differing forms of living the city experienced by lesbians and queers of color, but also privileges styles of urban inhabitation that, as Tongson develops in later chapters, dovetail all too easily with the logics of urban gentrification. Tongson also critiques a parallel presumption: that the process of coming out as publicly queer requires geographic relocation from the ostensibly homophobic countryside or repressive normativity of the suburbs to the gay-friendly streets of San Francisco or New York, where one enters the queer diaspora.
 
Thus rather than reading JJ Chinois’s relocation from Southern California to NYC through the accepted spatial logics of queer diaspora—as a move from a closeted “nowhere” of the suburbs to the out “somewhere” of the big city—Tongson attends to the centrality in Chan’s work of the series of “nowhere” stops along the road. Tongson coins the term “dykeaspora” (an admittedly “embarrassing neologism” [55]) to describe JJ Chinois’s queer journey throug h vernacular non-metropolitan landscapes—landscapes that had been color-coded, as it were, during the run-up to the heated 2000 presidential election, when the idiom of “red state” and “blue state” became a new national shorthand subsequently augmented as “retro versus metro” (64). One especially memorable stop on Chinois’s “dykeasporic” journey is a performance at a demolition derby at a “red state” state fair in Skowhegan, Maine. JJ Chinois, in a Young Republicans muscle shirt driving a pink car with gold wheels, loses the derby but wins the crowd. Rather than ostracize or threaten, the crowds embrace the transgender persona. Describing the event Chan writes, “I wasn’t so much making an ironic gesture, but finding a way of experiencing a genuine pleasure in shattering expectations about identity, race, and gender in places we think of as scary, nowhere places” (qtd. in Tongson 67). Tongson suggests that Chan’s JJ Chinois reveals that it is possible both to be “unapologetically, outlandishly queer” and to “traffic through the American heartland unscathed” (66). She argues that “Chan’s JJ Chinois project offers a model of queer encounter that is distinctly optimistic about the queer’s ability to move to, from, and through suburban and rural spaces without succumbing to the inevitable and self-fulfilling narratives of desperation and violence that haunt the spatial ‘peripheries'” (66). Tongson’s exploration of Chan’s work is rich, detailed and compelling; her final summary about its import is slightly less so. Her concluding sentence leaves unchallenged the “red state” homogeneity she otherwise critiques and refutes: “At the very least, JJ poses the possibility that we can, at once, empathize with the Other as well as invite the Other’s empathy, not only in our suffering but also in our pleasures” (66-67). There is something finally unsatisfying in Tongson’s reading of JJ Chinois as “strategically antiessentialist” (58), which risks repeating rather than intervening in the process by which whole swaths of the country are rendered by a single hue of red or blue.
 
Lynne Chan’s performance work provides a kind of road map for Relocations. Tongson importantly draws our attention to the ways Chan turns “sprawl to specificity” (37); this is a strategy that informs Tongson’s third and fourth chapters, as she begins to specify the terrain of her own sprawling Southern California youth spent in and around West Riverside. Taking extant visible evidence as her starting point-Victoria Boulevard, a fenced-off stub of “the parent navel orange tree”—Tongson tells the story of the emergence of this region in the late 19th century through the Reagan-era 1980s. She charts the emergence of the “Orange Empire,” where a botanical experiment, rich soil, immigrant labor, and British capital (plus water rerouted from the Colorado River) combined to produce the agricultural dynasty that made Riverside briefly the richest town in the nation in 1890 (116). Tongson describes the region’s transformation from agricultural richness into an “Inland Empire,” now a “repository for the region’s toxins from the groundwater up” (116). She also tracks the growth of Orange County, the rise of Disneyland and other area amusement parks that turned American normativity into a branded theme, as well as the U.S.’s latest global export. Here Tongson shows that the horizontal cities of Southern California never were simple culs-de-sac of white privilege but emerged and continue as “crossroads of empire” (116), built by immigrants and paid for by British foreign investment. The signs of such imperial crossing amplify as Tongson turns her attention to the crossroad closest to home—the intersection of “Van Buren Boulevard and Arlington Avenue, where a Kmart stands as the gateway to West Riverside” (158)—in a chapter she terms the “Empire of My Familiar” (112). She provides a rich, extended excavation of Studio K alongside the 1980s club scene that took shape at the very heart of the family-themed amusement park, Knott’s Berry Farm. Drawing on personal interviews, DJ playlists, and company archives, she re-animates the queer and proto- queer social world as it took shape within—and made queer use of—club dance floor moves, the pop rhythms of Gwen Stefani, hotel rooms, and backyard parties. Tongson concludes the chapter with a reading of Alex Espinoza’s Still Water Saints, a text that also explores the Southern California landscape as a palimpsest of present pasts. In the half-empty strip malls and ghost towns with Spanish names, “we find an archive and pedagogy of reading, of reimagining empire, race, and sexuality amid the ruins of an Inland Empire seemingly impervious to success” (154): with this passage Tongson describes Espinoza’s novel, but she could be describing her project as well.
 
The book’s final chapter takes us from West Riverside to East Los Angeles, which we encounter via the performances of Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (BdP). The chapter unfolds as a rich and extended close reading of their work, especially their 2007 fotonovela, “Fat Choca Ghetto Gurl,” and their 2008 play, “The Barber of East L.A.” These works consider the “tensions between feeling ‘at home’ within one’s own ethnic enclave and being ostracized for brandishing one’s butch, female body in the ‘hood'” (193). The BdP also dramatize a corollary tension “by establishing the brown butch’s preference for her ‘hood over the implicitly ‘cold’ and indifferent ‘big gay city'” (193). The questions are given additional urgency by the forces of gentrification transforming “Lesser Los Angeles.” Viewed from the perspective of the characters of BdP, gentrification creates urban ruins rather than renovating them—a welcome refusal and inversion of the accepted alibi of urban redevelopment. These sections of Relocations also extend a subtheme that tracks through Tongson’s text as a whole: that “mainstream” popular culture often provides more space for minoritized subjects than do subcultural genres. For example, the BdP bend Morrissey lyrics to their own ends, while the neighborhood’s central social space—the night club, the Vic—becomes the site of a violent clash with an encroaching white punk band (200). In summarizing her close critical reading of their work, Tongson concludes that the BdP “transforms commercial objects of the everyday into powerful, ludic symbols for the transcultural lived experiences of queer of color suburban subjects” (192). As with her analysis of Lynne Chan, Tongson’s account of the work of BdP could also be a description of the critical force of own project: an apt and timely reading not only of everyday popular objects but also of “how these objects are transformed through their consumption in specific settings, from the home, to the streets, to the disappeared social spaces of lesser Los Angeles” (182-183).
 
Relocations ends with a coda that is more road sign than destination: Tongson urges readers to shift “our spatial fantasies about sexuality from one kind of street life to another: to the compensatory form of motion and contact in spaces seemingly (if not actually) bereft of the urban luxury known as ‘walking culture'” (213). In doing so, Tongson takes on what has been understood since the mid-19th century as the ur form of urban experience: walking. “Driving in your car through lonely stretches of Southern California or elsewhere. Driving in your car with someone else . . . desperately seeking excitement elsewhere, somewhere, but realizing that it might just be all about the ride, the inevitably aimless transport of accidental reverie—and all about who you’re riding with” (213). This call to think through the modes of sociality formed within post-pedestrian landscapes is timely and important. Yet if her coda urges us to rethink queer suburban social spaces, her project as a whole—its method and its archive—also demands a belated rethinking of “walking culture” itself in a time when walking has its soundtrack, when iPods extend dashboard radios, video screens and windshields trade places, and moving through late modern spaces arguably takes on key attributes of auto-mobility.
 
Finally, what one sees in the rear view mirror, passing out of sight, is the idea of “the suburbs” themselves as a single, coherent urban form. Relocations is a text that recalibrates ways of looking at and listening into landscapes of American normativity by insisting that we cannot know them in advance. As a poignant, informed, and deeply researched project that makes a deft intervention into several fields of inquiry at once—queer theory, American studies, urban studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, the new suburban history—Relocations will be of interest to anyone concerned to comprehend the diverse lives lived in the “middle landscape,” which is to say, the “nowhere” that is where the vast majority of people in the United States both live and work. Much of the poignancy and critical urgency of Tongson’s book comes from a set of questions it rarely poses outright but which seem nonetheless to organize the project as a whole. The book is animated by (and perhaps also seeks to dull) the ache of having left a place— once home—behind: “As I learned only after I left it so many times over, the Inland Empire will keep bringing me back with a force at once mundane and powerful” (157). Indeed, the book “begins and ends with home” (xv), and is punctuated throughout with brief hard-to-shake images and unresolved glimpses of the very different modes of “making do” in the suburbs experienced by other members of her family—especially her mother, a jazz singer from Manila. We read, for example, that the Kmart that stands as the gateway to West Riverside is the “same Kmart where my mom worked her very first day job, transitioning from blue notes to blue-light specials because live music was not a service this imperial economy believed it could afford” (158). It is a harsh irony that Tongson’s core critical motif—the “remote intimacy” through which geographically isolated subjects form new modes of queer sociality—is hinged upon the very shift from live to recorded music that conditioned the isolated labor of her mother. Which is also to say: there are aspects of Tongson’s multivalent text that have the force and form of a coming out narrative, but here we discover that coming out as a queer child of the suburbs is perhaps more vexing, uncharted, and finally more ambivalent than coming out as queer intellectual.
 
In sum, Relocations succeeds powerfully in its effort to “trace the contours of suburban modes of queer sociability, affinity, and intimacy” (159); it tells an important story about the diverse lives lived in the horizontal cities of the United States through the keen optic of a queer Southern California adolescent circa 1980—one that importantly revises accepted ways of thinking about the inter-articulation of sexuality and space.