Reviews

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries by Karen Tongson

supernovaes's review against another edition

3.0

I really wanted to like this more than I did — a queer theory text by a Filipino lesbian about “queer of color” subcultures in the suburbs of SoCal? Sign me up. But by the end, I found myself frustrated by the book’s lack of engagement with Black and Indigenous queer folk, whose histories and subcultures should be essential to any kind of “queer of color” documentation. Like, the book analyzed Gwen Stefani’s harajuku era (which IS relevant) but only meaningfully engages w/ Black queer thought in a few places — and that engagement is a refutation of supposedly homonormative “urban narratives” pushed by Samuel Delany. Perhaps part of the problem, and why I’m using scare quotes, is the vagueness of the term “queer of color.” In the context of this book, that mainly means Asians and Chicanos. I also found the book’s objects of analysis a tad myopic, though I understand that part of that stems from an attempt to document “queer of color” subcultures. There are a lot of useful takeaways here, but those takeaways for me are, once again, marred by a lack of meaningful engagement with Black and Indigenous queer communities and histories. You’re telling an incomplete story by mentioning Compton without talking about Black people, and by critiquing the imperial legacy of the suburbs without mentioning the indigenous populations of “southern California” who have been the most profoundly impacted by these displacements and subsequent relocations.

That being said, if anyone has any recommendations for historical/theoretical texts on Black and/or Indigenous queer cultures of SoCal (or anywhere) I welcome them.