Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires

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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.

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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. * CHOICE *
Argentine Queer Tango is a beautifully conceptualized and researched book that dances in and out some of the most pervasive stereotypes about tango, gender, and Argentinean cosmopolitan aspirations. By paying attention to the desires and affects on the contemporary Argentinean queer tango dance floor, Mercedes Liska offers a fascinating account of the ways in which dancing bodies, in their never-ending search for the pleasures of 'the ritual of the embrace,' have reconfigured and destabilized naturalized gender identities as well as essentialist cultural boundaries. -- Alejandro L. Madrid, Cornell University
Mercedes Liskas work is a milestone in Latin-American gender musicology. By means of an intense ethnography and a brilliant and elaborate analysis, this work shows how the patriarchal structures and heteronormativity to which tango belongs are actually pervasive to new usages and signifiers that help construe new subjectivities, discourses, bodies and ways of life; that is, how subaltern subjects build a future out of an old and hegemonic tradition. -- Rubn Lpez-Cano, Escuela de Msica de Catalunia, Barcelona

Author Bio

Mercedes Liska is professorin communication sciences at the University of Buenos Aires.