Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires' Night Life

Abstract

How about some of the symbols of machismo in the twentieth century Argentina become a queer experience? This paper analyzes the changes in the dance of tango in Buenos Aires during the first decade of the century, changes associated with contemporary political, social and cultural development in the field of gender and sexual diversity.The book describes the process of diversification of dance experiences, against normalizing and conservative tendency of earlier times. In this regard, it focuses on one of the proposed alternatives to conventional tango (heir to the golden age of tango), the queer tango, a key to observe the practices of contemporary dance in the city of Buenos Aires is made.Dancing instituting same-sex, queer tango energized practice and proposing ways of social interaction rethink one of the bastions of the heteronormative culture from a lesbo-feminist conception and imagining social transformation processes from bodily experiences. This bet is managed within a framework of intense changes in state policies on gender and expansion of civil rights, while in a constant dialogue between queer tango activities that make up a community of transnational practice. This allows us to analyze how local frameworks interact with the current terms of cultural globalization.In particular, this research analyzes the enhancement of the experience of dancing in the port city; the changes in the dynamics of dance from the displacement of the heteronormative tango configuration (retaking the historical background of modernization of dance according to the hygienist doctrine); how body techniques and gender theories involved in decoding historical senses of tango, setting a new map of conflicts and questions.In turn, these processes of production and reception of tango are observed in relation to a redefinition in political ways of thinking in music; the links between state policies and the provision of musical practices; the modes of socialization gay-hetero night post-ghettos in the paradigm of sexual diversity; the retrofits that are set when the "politically correct" in discursive terms is with the experience of pleasure in dancing.This work brings together historical, ethnographic and aesthetic materials are interrogated from the field of concerns and discussions of cultural studies, enriched with contributions of studies on popular culture, popular music, anthropology of dance, sociology of culture and theories feminists and of genre. In turn, incorporates two theoretical and methodological perspectives that are, on the one hand, the analysis of dance in close relationship with music (incorporating resources musicology and ethnomusicology), and other ethnographic gaze, involving the body´s own experience .