Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson is a Presidential Visiting Professor in American Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is Professor of gender & sexuality studies, English and American studies & ethnicity, and the chair of the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. The 2019 recipient of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, Tongson is the author of three books: Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV that Soothes Us (2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019) and, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). For ten years, she co-edited the award-winning book series, Postmillennial Pop with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press. Currently, she serves as editor-at-large at air/light magazine, and on several other editorial boards for scholarly journals. Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in Slate, NPR, The Criterion Collection, The Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, The Los Angeles Times, KCRW’s Good Food, BuzzFeed Reader, The Washington Post, The AV Club, Entertainment Weekly and Süddeutsche Zeitung, among other venues. She is the founder and director of the Mellon-funded Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race & Public Culture at USC Dornsife. Tongson co-created, co-hosted and co-produced the podcast Waiting to X-Hale with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh from 2019-2023. Together, they also co-curated the LA Philharmonic’s 2022 GenX Festival.  Tongson continues to co-host the podcast The Gaymazing Race with Nicole J. Georges. She served as President of the Association for Studies of the Arts of the Present in 2022, and co-organized the ASAP/13 conference in Los Angeles at UCLA that same year. She also held a Hunt-Simes Chair in Sexuality Studies at the University of Sydney in 2023. 

Before joining the faculty at USC, Tongson received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She held a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship in Literature at UC San Diego (2003-2005), and a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine (2004).

A few recent publications:

“Narrative Plentitude in The Ultimatum: Queer Love,” for Film Quarterly (solicited), Berkeley: University of California Press, March 2024.

“The Stars are Hollow: On Gilmore Girls as Normporn” for Literary Hub, an excerpt from Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us (November 22, 2023).

“Karen Tongson’s Diaspora Jukebox Playlist” for Zócalo Public Square (November 9, 2023).

“Intermezzo” in air/light magazine (Summer/Fall 2023).

“It Might Be You” Brings Tootsie’s Queer Potential to the Surface.” Criterion Collection Songbook (November 22, 2021)

“A Chair Reviews The Chair.” Slate (August 20, 2021)