Kranidis M Summary -Relocations-

Maria Kranidis-Relocations-queer suburban imaginaries-Tongson

 

 

Tongson begins her argument by creating topographies where gay worlds meet/collide or reconstruct what she calls, the here/there/nowhere of community life and activities. The first part of her book localizes the need of a heterosexual normalized way of suburban life after World War II and how the design of the suburban was planned to accommodate and promote the normalities of heterosexual marriage and production. The urban gay way of life was one of multi race and multi gendered world which by the shift of the suburban move found itself in the middle of “transformative mass movements where politics and styles of living converge.” This movement constitutes aspects of 20th century gay movements both political and cultural.

 

 

By localizing the white bourgeois design in the suburbs, the highways, shopping malls, the cul-de-sc=ac and the competition between the Joneses, gay opportunity opens itself to a new way of expression. As suburbia is between the urban and the country the in between place does not suggest isolation or exclusion; instead it suggests inclusion of other architectural, ideological, stylistic rhetoric…etc It also provides a certain ambiguity that allows

 

Anti-urbanism-cities served as the end points for the “ravaged American dream for immigrants as well as queers. The suburbs have been reconstructed as other minorities move into the suburbs and change the design. The death of the suburban utopia of white, heterosexual, children producing family structure changed, and as other economic, low income housing becoming available in the suburbs, the collapse of the “normative” of the previous and as “queer urbanities  have contributed to the latter-day suburban migrations of communities of color from more traditional, ethnic urban enclaves deeper into suburbia.”

 

Tongson in here study looks at “white flight narratives to route al opposite trajectory for queer subjects who are-for cultural, political, and stylistic reasons-compelled to leave ostensibly homogenous suburban spaces to find more active lifestyles in the urban “gay meccas” of the national imaginary, as much as it does create a history and rhetoric of how and why the queer suburban relationship created a cultural history.

One thought on “Kranidis M Summary -Relocations-

  1. alexislothian

    I’m not sure from the summary whether you are reading Tongson as locating white heterosexuality in the suburbs or out of them; she makes a convincing case for the role that gentrification has played in creating queer of color suburbias, though it could be interesting to discuss how far that is and is not true outside of the geographical specificity of southern California.

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