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Medics, Crooks, and Tango Queens: The National Appropriation of a Gay Tango
Ascend the winding stair to LugarGay, an LGBT Community Centre in Buenos Aires and queer tango venue, and you pass a reproduction of an old photograph of men, wearing aprons, in a market, posing in tango couples. Elsewhere in Buenos Aires, a cropped version in a glass case at the National Museum of Dance & Hall of Fame is labelled ‘Baile popular en el Abasto (c. 1910)’. Yet another photograph of men in a street, some standing, some posing in couples, with a seated bandoneon player is a still more well-known example of this genre: historical images of men not dancing but posing with each other as tango couples. Marked, especially since the ‘Tango Renaissance’ (the ‘Tango Renaissance’ refers to the period of intense renewed interest in tango immediately following the fall in 1983 of the military dictatorship in Argentina, in part, a function of the need to reconstruct Argentinian identity), as documenting important dimensions of tango’s de facto history, their meanings remain contested. Drawing on a methodology of visual ethnography, this chapter examines how historical photographic and non-photographic representations of male, same-sex tango dancing are deployed in contemporary, late-modern contexts. Specifically, it will examine the manner in which these are used in both ‘mainstream’ and ‘queer’ tango-related web and publicity contexts variably to confirm or contest an ‘official history of tango’. We will show that in the hands of a social media-driven international queer tango community, such historical representations of men dancing tango form an emergent queer iconography that seeks to reclaim and re-visualise emplaced cultural memories marginalised, in the name of an ascendant queer contemporary.
Early 20th century imagery of men dancing tango together is endlessly reproduced on 21st century tango websites around the world. Tango “began with men dancing with each other” so the oft-repeated assertion goes. Perhaps. Late 19th and early 20th century society in Argentina famously consisted of young, largely immigrant men outnumbering women seven to one. But if they danced with each other, what exactly were they doing? And to what extent can these images help us find out? Were they just ‘practicing’, as Tobin’s (1998; 2009) and Denniston’s (2007) 20th century male informants assert? The tango origin myth says (Davis 2015 among others) that they practiced with each other, the better to secure the favors of women on the dance-floor and beyond? Possibly. Were they gay? Presumably some were. Another explanation might be that in a society where physical intimacy of all kinds was in short supply, some of these images show men who found in tango a ‘safe space’ to hold and to be held. Yet, how are we to know?
The Queer Tango Image Archive – an online, digital collection of pre-1995 historical imagery – was set up to stimulate debate and address questions like these. Queer theory, among other things, would have us escape the woman-man, LGBT-straight binaries. ‘Gay’ might be irrelevant. Might this contemporary freedom help support alternative interpretations of historical imagery? And might that credibly alter and enrich our understanding of what we think we see?
This ethno-identity dance is equally sexy for both men and women. In looking at the wide variety of tango variations, Shay views them through the lens of theater and fantasy: dramatic and theatrical movements and gestures and the sexual fantasies that the tango performance produces for many participants. He describes the history of the dance: how it originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires, found popularity in turn-of-the-century Paris and London, and gained acceptance among Argentine elites. He describes its movements, stressing the importance of improvisation. Shay then looks at the machismo role of the male dancer and femme fatale role of the woman.
Francis Poulenc’s Sonate pour violon et piano exists as something of a hybrid work. Dedicated to the memory of Spanish resistant poet Federico García Lorca, the sonata’s slow movement, the “Intermezzo”, is prepended with the opening line of Lorca’s “Las Seis Cuerdas”. As a consequence, the movement is imbued with a programmatic quality that causes it to sit somewhere inbetween Poulenc’s instrumental and vocal works. In this essay, I take advantage of this hermeneutic quality to explore the composer’s relation to Lorca and surrealism more generally, and how this manifests in the”“Intermezzo”. Ultimately, I argue that the movement is more than simply a lament over Lorca’s tragic death, and is in fact a broader expression of Poulenc’s despair towards a political and social climate that seeks to marginalize on the basis of sexual identity.
In a hidden sweatshop in downtown Los Angeles, Asian and Latino migrants produce automobile parts for a factory in Detroit. As the parts leave the production line, they are stamped “Made in Brazil.” In a small village in the heart of Mexico, a young woman at her father’s wake wears a black T-shirt sent to her by a brother in the United States. The shirt bears a legend that some of the mourners understand but she does not. It reads, “Let’s Have Fun Tonight!” And on the Tijuana-San Diego border, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, a writer originally from Mexico City, reflects on the time he has spent in what he calls “the gap between two worlds”: “Today, eight years after my departure, when they ask me for my nationality or ethnic identity, I cannot answer with a single word, for my ‘identity’ now possesses multiple repertoires: I am Mexican but I am also Chicano and Latin American. On the border they call me ‘chilango’ or ‘mexiquillo’; in the capital, ‘pocho’ or ‘norteno,’ and in Spain ‘sudaca.’… My companion Emily is Anglo-Italian but she speaks Spanish with an Argentinian accent. Together we wander through the ruined Babel that is our American postmodemity.”
Roger Rouse is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the University of California, Davis, Center for Comparative Research, where he is completing a book on the topic of his 1989 Stanford dissertation, "Mexican Migration to the USA: Family Relations in the Development of a Transnational Migrant Circuit."
The first version of this paper was written in early 1988 while I was a visiting research fellow at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego. It draws on fieldwork carried out between 1982 and 1984 under a doctoral fellowship from the Inter-American Foundation. I am grateful to both organizations for their support. Many of the ideas contained in the paper were developed in a study group on postmodernism organized with colleagues from the center. My principal thanks—for comments, criticisms, and immensely pleasant company—go to the group's members: Josefina Alcazar, Alberto Aziz, Roger Bartra, Luin Goldring, Lidia Pico, Claudia Schatán, and Francisco Valdés. I have also benefited from Khachig Tölölyan's sensitive reading of the text.
1. See Lockwood and Leinberger 35. The assertion of a false point of origin is apparently used so that the manufacturers can participate in foreign delivery contracts. See Soja 217.
2. "Hoy, ocho años de mi partida, cuando me preguntan por mi nacionalidad o identidad étnica, no puedo responder con una palabra, pues mi 'identidad' ya posee repertorios múltiples: soy mexicano pero tambien soy chicano y latinoamericano. En la frontera me dicen 'chilango' o 'mexiquillo;' en la capital 'pocho' o 'norteno' y en España 'sudaca.' . . . Mi compañera Emilia es angloitaliana pero habla español con acento argentine; y juntos caminamos entre los escombros de la torre de Babel de nuestra posmodernidad americana." Gómez-Peña (my translation).
3. See, for example, Clifford 22; and Rosaldo, Culture and Truth 217.
4. Jameson 83. Like Jameson, I find it useful to follow Ernest Mandel in arguing for the emergence since the Second World War of a new phase in monopoly capitalism, but I prefer to label this phase "transnational" rather than "late" partly to avoid the implication of imminent transcendence and, more positively, to emphasize the crucial role played by the constant movement of capital, labor, and information across national borders.
5. See Davis, "Urban Renaissance"; and Lipsitz, esp. 161.
6. It is important to stress that I am concerned not with the various meanings of this particular term but instead with the image itself. The term serves merely as a convenient marker.
7. See Williams 65-66.
8. Williams 65-66.
9. The combination of these images is readily apparent in the classic works on rural social organization by Robert Redfield and Eric Wolf (The Little Community and Peasant Society and Culture and "Types of Latin American Peasantry"), both of whom draw heavily on Mexican materials, and can also be seen in Immanuel Wallerstein's tendency (in The Capitalist World Economy) to use nation-states as the constituent units of his world system, at least in the core.
10. This approach has been used in two related but different kinds of study. In work focusing on migration itself—especially on migration within Mexico—changes have commonly been gauged by comparing the forms of organization found in the points of destination with arrangements revealed by detailed research in the specific communities from which the migrants have come. See, for example, Butterworth; Kemper; and Lewis. In work on communities known to contain a significant number of migrants and descendants of migrants—and especially in work on Mexican and Chicano communities in the United States—it has been more common to compare forms of organization found in these communities with arrangements discovered...
Outline of a Theory of Practice is recognized as a major theoretical text on the foundations of anthropology and sociology. Pierre Bourdieu, a distinguished French anthropologist, develops a theory of practice which is simultaneously a critique of the methods and postures of social science and a general account of how human action should be understood. With his central concept of the habitus, the principle which negotiates between objective structures and practices, Bourdieu is able to transcend the dichotomies which have shaped theoretical thinking about the social world. The author draws on his fieldwork in Kabylia (Algeria) to illustrate his theoretical propositions. With detailed study of matrimonial strategies and the role of rite and myth, he analyses the dialectical process of the 'incorporation of structures' and the objectification of habitus, whereby social formations tend to reproduce themselves. A rigorous consistent materialist approach lays the foundations for a theory of symbolic capital and, through analysis of the different modes of domination, a theory of symbolic power.
A new cinema of the Caribbean is emerging, joining the company of the other 'Third Cinemas'. It is related to, but different from the vibrant film and other forms of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) 'blacks' of the diasporas of the West - the new post-colonial subjects. All these cultural practices and forms of representation have the black subject at their centre, putting the issue of cultural identity in question. Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak? Practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write - the positions of enunciation. What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say 'in our own name', of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term, 'cultural identity', lays claim. We seek, here, to open a dialogue, an investigation, on the subject of cultural identity and representation. Of course, the 'I' who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, 'enunciated'. We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always 'in context', positioned. I
The recent history of Puerto Ricans as a community can be tracked by their participation in the rise of the hip hop culture, specifically in rap. The present identity of Latino rap is connected with the original placement of Latinos in rap and affirms the multicultural nature of popular culture. (SLD)
Conjugating Subjects: The Heteroglossia of Essence and Resistance
- Alarcón