Relocations

Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780814784082
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

1 Relocations

Queer Suburban Imaginaries

THIS BOOK FLOWS from beginning to end through the freeway tributaries that tenuously bind the sprawling counties of Southern California’s suburban landscape. We enter these counties that glow at night like neat sherbet grids from the twisted surfaces of concrete cloverleaves, the elaborate off-ramps that spiral toward “home” past earnestly edged lawns, big-box shops, and tawdry strip malls looking wan beneath layers of worn stucco, yet teeming with more than mere commerce. 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.¹

Before we take this ride together, allow me to offer you a map of this introduction. By design, the Southern California suburbs leaves a lot of ground to cover, and the presumed conformity of its landscapes leave little in the way of route markers to prevent getting lost. Add to that the layers of customization this project demands—from the suburbs’ forms real and imagined, to the queer theories that animate this intervention, to the imperial histories paved over by suburban architectures of convenience—and the sprawl grows with no distinct landmarks in view. I ask that you activate your architectural imagination as you take this journey of relocation to places that will seem all too familiar yet will become utterly unrecognizable.

Think of the first half of this introduction as the foundation and frame for the structures of suburban sociability and aesthetic practice I hope to make legible throughout Relocations. Contemporary scholarly and media discourses about the suburbs converge with queer theoretical debates about urbanity, rurality, regionalism, and transnationalism to establish the stakes of remapping queer of color topographies in Southern California, a region redolent with the residue of American imperial ambitions. The second half of this introduction completes the facade and finishes the interior by turning to the modes, technologies, and practices of suburban representation in books, on television, and in popular music. We will not so much read, look at, or listen to books, TV shows, and songs about the suburbs, but rather read, look, and listen into and through the suburbs as they shape, and are shaped by, the queer imaginaries that reside there.

One of the frustrations of driving through suburban space is arriving at culde-sacs (dead ends by a fancier name), meant to impede drivers in search of shortcuts while maintaining the tranquility of subdivisions impervious to outsiders. The end of this introduction may, perhaps, irritate you with an outro that refuses the convenience of chapter summaries, the tidy paragraphs that provide a shortcut through the sprawl of Relocations’ disparate landscapes, from Orange County, to the Inland Empire, to East and Southeast Los Angeles. The profound figures in my own queer of color suburban imaginary—the focal subjects and objects of this book—appear instead in cameos throughout this introduction. They announce themselves at key instances, when a topic or theory calls them out to join individually or collectively. This approach is less for the sake of tranquility as it is a sincere appeal to your interest as a reader, one with the generosity to follow Relocations through its contours and flows. Though I know it may be a fantasy to expect everyone to read from cover to cover about the sprawling spaces that ritually disabuse us of the concept of “boundaries,” I’m determined to luxuriate in this delusion as a form of tribute to these landscapes without end that are said to herald the end of everything.

Stylistically, the first half of this introduction may not seem all that glamorous in its workmanly efforts to offer a sturdy structure for the embellishments and improvisations that a beautiful facade and warm interior demand. But if you pardon the construction and await the stillness of the machinery coming to a halt, you may hear the music coming from another place you mistook as home.

Framing the Suburbs

Through a range of scholarly discourses—from literary history and media studies, to critical geography, social history, and cultural studies—we have learned that the American suburbs, post–World War II, were meant to achieve the architectural embodiment of peaceful similitude.² The postwar suburbs would serve as sanctuaries of the good life where racial and economic homogeneity guaranteed “safety,” while satisfying the white middle classes’ desires for a lived environment that struck a delicate balance between privacy and community. As the media studies scholar Lynn Spigel notes in her watershed study Welcome to the Dream House: “At the center of suburban space was the young, upwardly mobile middle-class family; the suburban community was, in its spatial articulations, designed to correspond with and reproduce patterns of nuclear family life… . Older people, gay and lesbian people, homeless people, unmarried people, and people of color were simply written out of these community spaces, and were relegated back to the cities.”³ As I argue throughout Relocations, the predictable routes of transit meant to keep the white middle classes at a reassuring remove from nonnormative subjects have been dramatically rerouted. I invoke the spatial containments mapped by Spigel’s work, known colloquially as the logic of “white flight,” as a starting point for this book’s efforts to forge a reparative, queer relationship to the suburbs:⁴ one that might help rewrite the many others “relegated back to the cities” (especially queers of color) back in to an ever-sprawling suburban cultural history that may or may not want them.

At the heart of Relocations are two critical interventions that merge and weave in tandem. First, the book tackles and radically revises prevailing national discourses about the suburbs that perpetuate the mythos of its racialized, classed, and sexualized homogeneity. Though the mass suburban migration previously known as white flight has recalibrated its coordinates since the places Jane Jacobs famously identified as “great American cities” have undergone massive “rehabilitation” efforts in the last several decades, perceptions about the suburbs’ lack of economic, racial, and sexual diversity have endured.⁵ Second, Relocations intervenes in a queer theoretical discourse that relies on these same normative, suburban, white flight narratives to route an opposite trajectory for queer subjects who are—for cultural, political, and stylistic reasons—compelled to leave ostensibly homogenous suburban spaces to find more active (and implicitly activist) lifestyles in the urban “gay meccas” of the national imaginary, including San Francisco and New York.

On a national scale, the changing demographics of the suburbs have been the focus of volumes of work in numerous disciplines, from critical geography, to ethnic studies, to suburban studies itself. The most comprehensive collection of suburban studies to date, Becky M. Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese’s The Suburb Reader, culls from this vast interdisciplinary and representational archive to animate the historical, legal, political, and aesthetic debates that have reconfigured the American suburbs since their inception in the nineteenth century and their mass proliferation after World War II. Four sections of the reader with over thirty individual excerpts reconstruct several pivotal moments in the American suburbs’ transformation, from “Ethnic Diversity in Early Suburbia” (chap. 7), to “Postwar Suburbs and the Construction of Race” (chap. 11), to “Recent Suburban Transformations, 1970–2000” (chap. 14), to “Inclusion and Exclusion in Recent Suburbia” (chap. 15). The genealogy Nicolaides and Wiese construct in The Suburb Reader offers an instructive snapshot of how American ideology, civic legislation, immigration laws, and intensified forms of late-capitalist privatization have flowed in and through U.S. suburbs. Early conflicts about the political ramifications of white, working-class immigrants buying into capitalist ideologies of home ownership, for example, are juxtaposed with Supreme Court debates about restrictive covenants discriminating against African Americans and other communities of color in the late 1940s.⁶ The diversification of the American suburbs after the momentous changes in U.S. immigration law in 1965 is also contextualized alongside the thinly veiled variations on restricted covenants in contemporary gated communities.⁷ Yet other excerpts focus on the lived experience of new immigrants and people of color moving into suburbs that exclusively cater to such “niche” communities.⁸

The contemporary media has also focused anew on the suburbs in the last decade as, simultaneously, a design-worthy destination for thirtysomething hipsters in pursuit of mid-century nostalgia and a simmering cauldron of racial and economic tension portending the meltdown of the “American dream.” Glossy magazines like Details (“Why the Suburbs Are Cooler Than Downtown,” November 2007) and Dwell (“The New Suburbanism,” December 2007/January 2008) provide stylish primers for the penny-wise “bourgeois bohemian” (or “Bobo”) on how to settle suburbs as the next “hot spots” after certain flip-worthy urban neighborhoods have reached their apex.⁹ In April 2000, the New York Times Magazine produced a special issue titled “Suburbs Rule: How the New Suburban Majority Is Changing America.” Chock-full of essays by an eclectic assemblage of nonfiction writers and media superstars like Michael Pollan, Martha Stewart, and David Brooks, as well as fiction writers like T. C. Boyle, Amy Bloom, Chang-rae Lee, A. M. Homes, George Saunders, and Manil Suri, this supplement did its best to represent the changing demographics of the suburbs in think pieces like “Migration of the Melting Pot” (by Lawrence Osborne) while revisiting some of its more durable character motifs of bored teenagers and licentious housewives.¹⁰ Exposés on gang wars “invading” the suburbs appear nightly on news programs (notably in Nightline’s September 2005 piece on the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha gang, in greater Washington DC), while their root causes of social inequality are considered in more sustained forms, like the investigative journalist Sarah Garland’s book Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence Are Changing America’s Suburbs.

Given such expansive, neatly collated, and meticulously documented evidence to the contrary, how then does the gestalt of the suburbs remain largely unchanged in the American imaginary? There are, of course, numerous answers to this question, most of which can be attributed to enduring representations of the suburbs as a ticky-tacky void in literature, television, popular music, media, and the arts. As Andrew Blauvelt, one of the curators of the groundbreaking Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes exhibit, remarks in the extensive catalog for the show (held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and then the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh), “Most of what we think we know about suburbia has been shaped by its portrayal in various media—film, music, literature, and television in particular—where it has been depicted alternately as an idyllic setting for family life in TV sitcoms, for instance, and a dysfunctional landscape of discontent in Hollywood movies.”¹¹ As Relocations will show throughout its many pages mimicking, at certain instances, suburbia’s tidy yet nebulous sprawl, even this representational field has been marred by strange and wild things growing where they shouldn’t. But before tackling this larger and more intricate problem of representation through reading, watching, and listening, I want to turn our attention to another theoretical conjecture, one very specific to this project, for why even the postmillennial suburbs remain the presumed natural habitat for normativity: that of queer studies.

Throughout its institutional history, queer studies has produced its share of spatial Others for the sake of maintaining its urbane reputation and cosmopolitan orientation. From George Chauncey’s groundbreaking study of Gay New York, to contemporary projects attentive to lesbian cosmopolitanisms, like Diane Chisholm’s Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City and Julie Abraham’s Metropolitan Lovers: The Homosexuality of Cities, queer studies has self-consciously undertaken the task of documenting its rich urban histories and metropolitan forms of cultural production.¹² In her important book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Judith Halberstam assigns a neologism to describe this urbanist legacy in queer studies: “metronormativity.” As Halberstam argues, her term “reveals the conflation of ‘urban’ and ‘visible’ in many normalizing narratives of gay/lesbian subjectivities,” creating a compulsory narrative of migration for queer subjects that marks the development of “previously closeted subjects who ‘come out’ into an urban setting.”¹³ The more that metronormativity takes shape conceptually in Halberstam’s book, the more it comes to describe the dialectic—experienced both psychically and spatially—between the rural and the urban in queer studies. As I discuss further in my chapters on Lynne Chan’s JJ Chinois projects and on Southern California’s Inland Empire, Halberstam’s critique of metronormativity opens the possibility of opting out of a compulsory queer movement toward “the city,” a move predicated on acquiring a greater sense of “pride,” “liberation,” and safety for queer subjects thought to be in emotional, aesthetic, and physical peril in nonurban environments.

Yet unlike other scholars of queer rurality or of the queer peripheries more broadly defined, Halberstam inevitably refuses to relinquish “the city” as the emblematic habitat for queers. She writes, “In a Queer Time and Place both confirms that queer subcultures thrive in urban areas and contests the essential characterizations of queer life as urban.”¹⁴ Eschewing the either/or of the urban/rural binary for an either/and, Halberstam instead calls on other queer scholars to explore the different “truth[s] to this division between urban and small-town life [and] between hetero-familial cultures and queer creative and sexual cultures,” without “occlud[ing] the lives of nonurban queers.”¹⁵ In a Queer Time and Place focuses primarily on a rural “horror of the heartlands” mythology at the core of representational debates about the transgender icon who was a martyr of rural violence, Brandon Teena (subject of the well-known documentary and subsequent feature film). Beyond her chapter on Teena, however, Halberstam leaves the task of documenting the complex interrelations of queer life beyond metropolitan subcultures to other scholars.

Of course, numerous scholars documented queer life outside metropolitan centers long before Halberstam’s study of homo- and heteronormative approaches to time and space.¹⁶ Lauren Berlant’s The Queen of America Goes to Washington City reminds us, for example, that even the most radical of urban queer activist groups, such as Queer Nation and San Francisco’s SHOP (the Suburban Homosexual Outreach Program), staged some of their more spectacular and performative “invasions” in suburban shopping malls.¹⁷ Nevertheless, the spatiotemporal concept of metronormativity and Halberstam’s emphasis on subcultures and queer lifestyles has had a legible and significant impact on how contemporary queer scholarship envisions its interventions into queer urbanism, despite Halberstam’s residual attachments to urban settings for subcultural expression.

In subsequent chapters of Relocations, I grapple with some of these residual fantasies about urban queer subcultures and their purported “radicality” in the sphere of queer aesthetics and politics. Even after metronormativity was named, in other words, queer studies has remained reliant on the forms and formalisms of urbanist subcultural idioms in ways that often preclude a serious consideration of the more problematic forms of racialized and classed desires for the “backward,” aesthetically and politically “conventional,” or “mainstream.” In the introduction to his remarkable work Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism, Scott Herring fashions a discursive jukebox out of some of queer studies’ greatest hits: the urbanist one-liners used to dismiss the hicks and small-town queers (as well as the Podunks they came from) from a special class reserved for metropolitan minds and mind-sets. With line after line, hit after hit from scholars like Michael Warner and George Chauncey, Herring sketches the “entwined urbanism that bridges the givens of everyday lesbian and gay metropolitan life in the United States and the shared assumptions of U.S.-based ...