Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries by Karen Tongson (review)

Karen Tongson’s Relocations leads nowhere. It moves, music blasting, through the amusement parks, strip malls, streets, and highways of Southern California’s suburban landscape without any particular destination in mind. But this is not a bad thing: with Tongson as our guide, this aimless tour becomes an invitation to imagine the suburban landscape through cartographies of the material and the ephemeral, the situated and the unbounded. As we move through these spaces, we find that what appear to be fixed geographical locations are little more than markers of the transnational movement of bodies, cultures, products, and discourses. Making this space legible requires movement through spaces both material and imagined in order to consider not only the physical landmarks and architectural design of suburban space but also the epistemological and cultural structures that mediate suburban imaginaries. Movement, she skillfully demonstrates, offers us a temporal and spatial frame that can obliterate the rarified boundaries between urban and suburban that obscure the transnational histories and queer spaces that undergird Southern California’s landscape.

Beginning with an introduction that seems to function as a license to cruise more than it does a roadmap to the book and continuing through the book’s coda, Relocations is not simply a book about movement: in its refusal to conform to normative conventions of scholarly writing, it is a book that moves. Yet, while its refusal to move somewhere advances a type of queer temporality that resists the reproductive and labor logic of capitalism, Relocations self-consciously reminds us that this very movement occurs within the imperial and capitalist networks that it seeks to dismantle. And that is precisely why it succeeds. By positioning individual movement within transnational and local movements of intimacies, commodities, knowledges, and peoples, Tongson pushes queer conceptualization of space and time proffered by the likes of Judith Halberstam and Elizabeth Freeman (see chapter 4) to consider how the development of queer mobility depends on “mutual disavowals as well as pernicious collusion” (88) with the capitalist, colonial, and racist logic of the state. Usefully demonstrating how an Asian Americanist critique might have broad applicability to scholarly discourse as a whole, Relocations brilliantly queers sites like Knott’s Berry Farm’s now defunct Studio K (see chapter 3) to show how such spaces became sites for challenging heteronormative conventions even as these very sites depended on the privatization of public space, racialized exclusion, suburban consumptive practices, and imperial circuits of art and aesthetics. Carefully showing how the “spatial fantasies engendered by textual and audiovisual echoes” (131) at places like Studio K cleave to Southern California’s landscape, Relocations skillfully links exclusionary queer consumptive practices to the Orientalism of Gwen Stefani’s Love. Angel. Music. Baby. (91–92) to erase the violence of U.S. imperialism.

Owing much to postcolonial readings of the city advanced by thinkers like Jane Jacobs and “third border” theorizations of Southern California’s geography proffered by scholars like Mike Davis and Alexandra Moctezuma, Relocations carefully maps how British colonial capital imperial policies become important forces in the negotiation of queer mobility. In a brilliant reconceptualization of what Freeman calls “temporal drag,” or the pressure queer movement presumably exerts on capitalist temporalities, Tongson theorizes queer mobilities. They are actions that refuse normative temporalities demanding corporal conformity to the allocation of time between labor and leisure toward maximum productivity. Yet, they nevertheless function within global circuits of commodity production and colonial knowledge. In order to theorize the complicated imbrications and disavowals inherent in queer of color movement, Tongson offers the admittedly cheeky neologism “dykeaspora” as a descriptive term to describe queer of color movement. Emphasizing the ways that dykeasporic subjects work within imperial networks and capitalist consumptive mandates, Tongson explores Lynn Chan’s performance art (see chapter 1), Alex Espinoza’s queer Latino fiction (chapter 4), and the work of performance group Butchlalis de Panochtitlan (chapter 5)--showing how they function within capitalist temporalities even as their movements refuse the “homogenizing imperatives...