Argentine Queer Tango

Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires

By (author) Mercedes Liska Translated by Peggy Westwell, Pablo Vila

Publication date:

15 September 2018

Length of book:

182 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498538534

Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires investigates changes in tango dancing in Buenos Aires during the first decade of the twenty-first century and its relationship to contemporary social and cultural transformations. Mercedes Liska focuses on one of the proposed alternatives to conventional tango, queer tango, which proposes to rethink one of the alleged icons of a national culture from a feminist conception and to imagine social transformation processes from bodily experiences. Specifically, this book analyzes the value of bodily experiences, the redefinition of the mind-body relationship, and the transformation in the dynamics of the dance from the heteronormative movements of tango. In doing so, Liska addresses the ways in which bodily techniques and gender theories are involved in the denaturing and corporeality decoding of tango and its historical senses as well as the connections between different tango dance practices spread throughout the world.

Contents
Introduction
Chapter One
Tango awaits you. Revitalization
Chapter Two
Aesthetic Canon and Cultural Matrices of the Modern Body
Chapter Three
Tango that Made me Queer: Gender Activism in Dance Form
Chapter Four
From Tradition to Betrayal: Innovations in Dance Music
Chapter Five
The Mecca of Tango: Buenos Aires and Cultural Globalization
Chapter Six
On the Dance Floor
Afterword
See You on Tuesday
Bibliography
About the Author

This detailed musicological study adds to contemporary tango scholarship by considering the adaptations made of its classic forms and traditions in lesbian-feminist cultural spaces. Queer tango, which has been around since the early 20th century, is the performing of the dance without regarding the traditionally male and female roles as leader and follower. This allows same-gender couples to occupy either role. Queer tango performance was revived in Germany in 2001, inspiring similar public performance spaces in other countries. Liska (communication sciences, Univ. of Buenos Aires, Argentina) begins by discussing the revitalization of tango in Argentina since the 1990s and then moves on to examine the interaction of different generations of dancers, changes in the paradigms of gender identities and the human body as culturally defined, homosexuality, and electronic music and its applications to the tango. The text is well written…. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates; graduate students, professionals.