For Episode 18, I am joined by cultural critic and superstar podcaster Karen Tongson to talk about teenage angst, celebrity, what makes pop music “popular,” and “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” (Episode 2, Season 5 of Black Mirror), which first premiered in 2019.

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I have always found it strange that “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” is one of the lowest-rated episodes of Black Mirror, because it is one of my favorites of the “aimed-at-Americans-era” BM episodes. I think a lot of the prejudice against this episode can be tied to people’s general reluctance to consider how complex popular music, popular culture, 

Dr. Karen Tongson is Professor of English, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and American Studies & Ethnicity, and Chair of the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the 2019 recipient of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Córdova Award for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction, and the author of two books: Why Karen Carpenter Matters (2019; nominated for a Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction; Best Music Books of 2019, Pitchfork; longlisted for The Believer Book Award, 2020), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). Her writing and cultural commentary have appeared in NPR, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), L.A. Weekly, BuzzFeed Reader, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Public Books, as well as in other scholarly and public forums. She has two books in progress: Empty Orchestra: Karaoke, Queer Performance, Queer Theory (Duke University Press), and NORMPORN: Television and the Spectacle of Normalcy (NYU Press). Postmillennial Pop, the award-winning book series she co-edits with Henry Jenkins at NYU Press, has published over twenty titles. 

Previously a panelist on MaximumFun.org’s Pop Rocket Podcast, she now cohosts the GenX-themed podcast, Waiting to X-hale, with Wynter Mitchell-Rohrbaugh.

Tongson is currently the director of a faculty-led initiative called the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Popular Culture–a start-up podcast network housed in the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies, and comprised of faculty across Dornsife and other schools committed to transposing scholarly research on popular culture to broader publics. 

You can listen to our “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” conversation in its entirety here:

Here at BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, we assume that everyone is already committed to read more, write more, think more, and be more… so here’s a helpful list of links to thinkers, technologies, books, and articles referenced in this episode:
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