Dr. Karen Tongson "returns" to deliver 2021 Queer Studies Lecture

It’s not unusual for academics to tell ourselves that the shows we are bingeing or the pop culture rabbit hole we’ve fallen down on the internet has intrinsic value to our research, but sometimes we cannot always see the tangible benefits. On October 14 at 4 PM, Dr. Karen Tongson, chair of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California, will be sharing what she calls these “benefits of distraction” as not only a research method but also an ethos for approaching queer studies in her lecture, Notes on Reading Errantly. 

“Throughout my many years as a scholar and cultural critic, I’ve been able to rethink and reframe the value of my errant desires, the “distractions” inspired by the so-called detritus of cultural production,” Tonsgon explains. 

While appearing on the Gertrude literary podcast, Tongson admitted that it’s very hard to sort through what are the distractions and what are the conditions of life and death in the current moment:

“It’s room for reflection, which usually, I think, we would characterize as room for distraction. The forms of self-reflection and kind of reassessing the structure of things, the way the world is constituted, might seem like a distraction from doing things in the world, but… there are too many things for us to focus on right now and they’re all vitally important: the death of the planet, the fascistic conditions… of the United States, the raging global pandemic that exposes an epic fail of all of our leaders in conceptualizing how to care for us, (and also exposes how that’s been a consistent set of failures accumulating over decades.”)

While there has been lots of research and attention on mental health and a natural decline in productivity for a lot of people during a time of collective anxiety over a global pandemic, Tongson is one of the first scholars to think through how these distractions could actually be helpful: 

“I think distraction is the mode of being. I think we’ve existed in a culture of gaslighting for centuries, but more acutely in the last four years or so. And so I think right now with this pause is our opportunity to gain a sense of clarity and perspective.”

You can listen to her interview on the fifth episode of the Gertrude literary podcast here:

https://gertrudepodcast.libsyn.com/karen-tongson

Tongson’s lecture promises to also give audience members insight into her approach to queer and cultural studies and will touch on the subject of normalcy or what she calls the “spaces of culture that are often discarded as too mainstream, or not ‘edgy’ or ‘wild’ enough to be imagined in queer worlds - like the suburbs, Karen Carpenter, karaoke, and primetime dramadies.”

These spaces of normalcy and challenges to what constitutes a queer space or queer performance are addressed in her two in-progress books, Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Queer Performance, Queer Theory and NORMPORN: Television and the Spectacle of Normalcy?  

The lecture will be held online via Zoom and is free to attend. Registration is required to receive Zoom link: Https://olemiss.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUtdO-hrTMvHNX2s9V5gp_PMeFoUbAoHUN9

To request information about disability access, please contact the Sarah Isom Center at 662.915.5916 or isomctr@olemiss.edu.