Rethinking intimacy: Semi-anonymous spaces and transitory attachments in Argentine tango dancing

Introduction

Tango dancing is very deep, in all aspects: socially, emotionally, culturally … Today I can’t imagine living without tango. (Ruben, 58-year-old, Argentina)

During ethnographic fieldwork in the tango dancehalls of Buenos Aires, San Francisco and Stockholm I encountered attachments that clearly impacted the dancers’ lives and on which they – for various reasons – depended. When trying to make sense of these experiences, however, I found it difficult to fit them in with traditional sociological categories. Tango seemed to creatively escape the bounds of relational structures such as the family, the romantic couple and friendships by reflecting aspects of all those attachments without being reducible to one of them. Dancers often describe their community in terms of a family, yet tango seems to have little to do with blood-based kinship and caring labour – rather it is shaped around a sensual skin-to-skin communication and a shared intimate orientation. In tango one objective is to make use of feelings characteristic for romantic attachments – but instead of forming exclusive dyads, the sensuality lays ground for a transitory intimacy shared by many. And although tango is depicted as a hobby, bringing friends together, the aficionados are non-typical comrades in regard to the bodily intimate conversations and the often limited knowledge they have of each other’s lives outside the dance floor. At first glance, tango thereby appears as a set of fluid attachments ready to fit with Zygmunt Bauman’s (2003) and Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim’s (2002) descriptions of liquid individualized late-modernity, in which people are unwilling to create deeper bonds and responsibilities. Yet, as the dancer Ruben accounts for in the above quote, for those entangled, dancing represents a deep affective structure, providing sense of belonging and entwined dependencies. But how?

In this article I address the question by putting tango in dialogue with ongoing sociological research on intimacy. I ask how the dancers live and experience closeness within a culture that requests participants to primarily communicate body-to-body and through transitory semi-anonymous attachments. What type of intimacy is produced and how is it reflected by the people inhabiting the world? Such queries aim not only at depicting the emergence of a particular expression of closeness, but also hold the objective of adding quite an ambivalent case to the field of intimacy studies. Also, this article contributes to the expanding area of tango research. Although intimacy is a central dimension in many academic tango studies (see Davis, 2015a; Manning, 2007; Savligliano, 1995; Taylor, 1998; Törnqvist, 2010, 2012, 2013; Törnqvist and Hardy, 2010), the dancing culture has not been explicitly framed and put in conversation with the broader sociological field of intimacy research. ¹ This article enters into dialogue with both fields by tracing the affective life of a culture that is often described in terms of temper and passion, not primarily from the dancers’ psychological states, but from the social structuring of the milieu. The reason why tango at times hurts, to paraphrase Eva Illouz’s (2012) book on contemporary love, is not only because of psychological mechanisms on an individual level, but rather – it will be argued – has to do with the emotional architecture of tango. In short, I am interested in how intimacy is entangled with the organizing of behaviour in ways that are related to how dancers feel, orient themselves and connect with others.

Turning to the academic field of intimacy research, the article’s focus and contribution may be introduced with the help of Lauren Berlant’s call to rethink intimacy. In the book Intimacy, she describes how hegemonic fantasies colonialize minds and bodies in a way that make us trapped within a rather narrow horizon when it comes not only to how close relations are lived, but also in regard to how we allow ourselves to imagine and make sense of our lives. Feelings of shame, sadness or worse: a sense of not being loveable or liveable subjects, come over us when we fail to adjust our lives to the appropriate scripts. ‘To rethink intimacy is to appraise how we have been and how we live and how we might imagine lives that make more sense than the ones so many are living’, Berlant states (2000: 6). She therefore calls for frameworks that encompass another type of liveability, embracing experience and imagination that do not conform to ‘reigning epistemes of cultural intelligibility’ (Butler, 2000: 23; cf. Ahmed, 2004: 103; Stacey, 2011). ² In different ways, the sociological field of intimacy studies moves in tandem with this call. Scholars have developed concepts and angles to describe past decades’ increasing divorce rates, shifts from life-long relationships to numerous shorter ones, the expansion of queer families and the growing impact of friendship relations (see work by Bauman, 2003; Bawin-Legros, 2004; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995, 2002; Giddens, 1992; Jamiesson, 1998, 1999; Lewis, 2001; Pahl and Spencer, 2004; Roseneil, 2007; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004; Ryan-Flood, 2009; Weeks, 2007; Weston, 1992). ³ Over recent decades, the field has also included new analytical approaches focusing on intimate relationships such as family not as fixed institutions but rather as on how people do family (Morgan, 1996). Others stress the importance of imagination and memory for understanding close relations (Gillis, 1996; Smart, 2007). Research covers critical contributions exploring relationships and communities that have not yet been put in scholarly dialogue with the intimacy literature, arguing that there is an expanding range of relationships that matter to people and that need to be addressed sociologically (Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004; Roseneil and Ketokivi, 2016). Recent studies have broadened the field with the ambition to reflect the complexity and multiple expressions of people’s personal lives by studying a variety of relations such as human–animal bonds (Charles, 2014), leisure activities such as singing in choirs (Mjöberg, 2011), single events (Henriksson, 2014), the haunting significance of dead partners and family (Roseneil, 2009), the intimate significance of scent in medical care work (Stenslund, 2015), to mention just a few. Concepts capturing this wider reach of significant others and vital intimacies have been labelled ‘personal community’ (Spencer and Pahl, 2006) and ‘personal life’, which ‘designates an area of life which impacts closely on people and means much to them’ (Smart, 2007: 28, 29).

However, this fairly open conceptual terrain also contains limitations. For instance, the sociological literature leaves us rather short when it comes to mobile processes of attachments found outside of institutionalized forms, such as those intimacies that are not family, or hardly even relationships. Similarly to Smart, but from a slightly different angle, Berlant’s contribution therefore represents a challenging prism for further rethinking exercises. Her interest in ‘the kinds of connections that impact on people, and on which they depend for living’ does not primarily address the realm of family life – which is the main focus for the ‘personal life’ approach – but rather explores ‘the energy of attachment [that] has no designated place’. ‘What happens’, she asks, ‘to the glances, gestures, encounters, collaborations, or fantasies that have no canon?’ (Berlant, 2000: 4, 5). Although tango dancing is bound to a social structure with its distinct practices, regulations and identity-shaping mythology, the accounts of ephemeral encounters with strangers, partly lived through imagination, reflect aspects of both Smart’s and Berlant’s concern. The culture resists a linear narrative in which intimacy is evaluated in regard to continuity and stability. The intimate touch, making up the basis for the dance floor connection, does not equal the first step in a relation with a desired prolongation on a friendship-based or romantic note. On the contrary, dancing is primarily experienced as creating its own pleasures; a sensual and emotional now-modus restricted in time and space. However, while the social architecture diverges from conventional peer bonds and romantic relations, tango appears to serve somewhat similar emotional and social needs. ⁴ In my interviews there are simultaneous accounts of transitory voluntary attachments parallel to stories about tango as a new family, a sort of collective identity that deeply affects its members and ties them together.

The article’s empirical section takes off from a discussion on the transitory semi-anonymous attachments, addressing how this empirical case diverges from dominant streams of sociological intimacy research which, traditionally, have associated intimacy with the private sphere, primarily with places of family shelter, at times even with the most intimate corners of a home such as bedrooms and bathrooms. According to Theodore Zeldin it equals ‘an intimate room … into which one withdrew from the hubbub of relatives and neighbours’ (1995: 324; cf. Simmel, 1971 [1903]). Recently, however, numerous studies stress intimate relations to be initiated and lived also in public spaces, such as workplaces, bars, streets, green areas and on the net (Berlant, 1997; Klesse, 2007; Morrill et al., 2005; Plummer, 2003; Roseneil and Budgeon, 2004: 154). Tango dancing offers an additional example: unfolding attachments emerging in commercialized public venues such as bars, restaurants and dance schools, as well as in free-of-charge community centres and city squares; locations that are formally open for anyone to enter and leave. Particularly in larger cities, these are fairly anonymous environments in which dancers – like visitors in a regular nightclub – have fairly limited knowledge about one another and meet in a transitory fashion. However, the level and degree of anonymity shifts with the local context and club. The larger and more transient the milonga and the city, the more likely visitors are to dance with total strangers. Still, also in fairly anonymous locations, visitors often encounter and dance with people they have met before. In this article the focus is mainly on larger venues with a global circuit of dancers and aspects reflecting the transitory semi-anonymous feature of the dancing. In the introductory empirical section, I address the social architecture of tango and how it generates an instant intimacy. In the following two empirical sections the article deals, first, with the significance and use of bodily communication and sensual memory in the production of intimacy, and second, with how the transitory culture manages to create a sense of belonging through a common intimate orientation and shared sentiment towards tango.

Intimacy as a relational quality

Analysing an empirical phenomenon that blurs the boundaries between family, romance and friendship requires concepts that transcend specific relational types. Instead of addressing intimacy in terms of a set of relationships, I advocate a shift in focus towards intimacy as a situational quality; a specific mode of interaction and a particular experience of closeness and connection that emerges in different relational forms. ⁵ This distinction implies that ‘no relationship is ever only intimate, and no intimate situation is by itself a relationship’ (Henriksson, 2014: 100). To address tango this way, we may consider Jessica Mjöberg’s work on intimate sociality. Using examples which are not bound to late-modernity – however not untypical for such societies either – like parent–child symbiosis, lovemaking and carnivals, she is able to dwell on what she perceives as a common denominator. ⁶ She defines intimacy as a ‘specific mode of being social … a sociality of presence’ found both within and outside relationships. This sociality is characterized by feelings of oceanic unity: ‘of being boundary-less in relation to self and other’; a mutual orientation to the interpersonal unit; experiences of being in a continuous present; and exclusivity (Mjöberg, 2011: 178, my translation; see also 2009: 15–17). In a similar fashion, Staci Newmahr’s (2011) work on sadomasochism explores intimacy as a relational quality. Drawing on Simmel’s essay on the secret, she addresses intimacy as those moments when the other is perceived as unique and when we-ness appears as exclusive; a time-out-of-time sensation of transcending self and sharing liminal experience. These works all offer a conceptualization that targets attachments lived beyond and across traditional figures. The intimate element is not restricted to a number of relational forms but can be identified as a quality that emerges in a range of interpersonal relations such as families as well as in erotic attachments over the Internet, therapist–patient relations and late-night transitory dancing. The strength of the approach is that it allows us to empirically broaden the field of study at the same time as we are urged to be analytically precise. We could, in other words, think of attachments normally exemplifying the intimate, such as marriage, as being lived and experienced both in accordance – and not – with an intimate quality. Rather than being used as an argument to exclude practices or relations as non-intimate, however, the primary benefit is that this approach allows us to shed light on a broader variety of attachments.

Although I find these works highly inspiring, the actual qualities being stressed trigger a number of questions. Mutuality, for instance, making up the core of Mjöberg’s definition, is a rather difficult criterion to evaluate sociologically, which the author also discusses. How do we know that both parts are equally oriented towards one another? Does a potential asymmetry affect the intimate quality on a subjective level? Is there ever a direct experience of the other? Thinking about sex, for instance, traditionally portrayed as a most intimate act, does not necessarily encompass mutuality in regard to how participants experience the situation. It is possible that one part performs the practices we associate with sex without perceiving herself as ‘in intimate relation’, while the counter-part senses what Mjöberg labels oceanic unity. For such reasons I wish not to fixate the notion of intimacy around a number of predefined aspects, rather I propose that we open up the framework and let the exact content remain a matter to empirically investigate within specific contexts.

Study design

How, then, to study an affective relational quality? Accepting intimacy to be a personal experience, not necessarily lived in mutual ways, puts focus on individual dancers’ accounts of closeness. Moreover, I am concerned also with the ways in which feelings of connectedness find resonance in the social structuring of the relations being analysed. In order to include both dancers’ accounts of lived intimacy and the context in which these affective experiences are made, the study is based on ethnographic fieldwork at tango clubs in Buenos Aires (two months), San Francisco (four months) and Stockholm (six months), involving interviews with 29 dancers. The fieldwork was conducted in 2007 and 2008, the interviews between 2007 and 2014. The informants, of which a few have been interviewed on several occasions, have been dancing tango between six months and 15 years. They are of different nationalities (11 North American, 8 Swedish, 6 Argentines, 2 French, 1 Australian and 1 Belgian), 18 are women, 11 men. Reflecting a bias within the culture, the informants predominantly belong to an economic, cultural and urban middle class, represented by professions such as teachers, medical doctors, engineers and artists. The age group varies from 20 to 70 years old, with a majority in their thirties to late fifties. An absolute majority define themselves as heterosexual, at the time of the interview a majority were singles, some of them had just ended a marriage or a long-term relationship.

At the same time as the tango is constituted through reflexive processes by which intimacy is narrated and negotiated, this is also a culture lived through the body. Combining observational data and interviews therefore has several advantages. First, it enables us to encounter multiple and conflicting meanings of a particular practice, such as the dance embrace. Observing the abrazo – or even embodying it oneself – adds additional meaning to the informants’ verbal accounts of bodily communication and closeness in tango. Second, combining ethnographic observations with interview accounts enables us to interrogate, when necessary, the inconsistencies between practice and discourse as a way of exploring emotional dilemmas and conflicts. Third, the study design aims to create a dynamic in the analytical process: an interpretative interplay between closeness and distance to the field of study. The ethnographic work has partially been carried out as a ‘chest-to-chest’ connection between me, the researcher, and the ‘cosmos under investigation’ (Wacquant, 2004: viii). Partly approaching the culture on high heels has provided me with an experiential understanding and an affective and bodily language for making sense of it from the vantage point of an insider (Newmahr, 2008). As Brian Lande puts it in his carnal ethnography on the production of soldiers, in which he enrols as an army cadet in the United States Officer Training Corp: ‘passive participant observation and interviews would not suffice because what I wanted to know about was often pre-thetic and inarticulate’ (2007: 98). Incarnating the tango culture, ‘prying into the sentient, lived, and breathing body’ (2007: 98), means that I, like other dancers, have worked hard trying to achieve the technique and emotional compass that would allow me to enter into the intimate dance flow and explore it at greater proximity.

Approaching the empirical object as an insider had the advantage of providing me with close-up scenes and facilitated finding informants. ⁷ In addition, exposing myself emotionally and bodily to the tango generated another ground for formulating research questions and relating to informants. Many interviews quickly turned confidential in content and tone, touching upon emotionally delicate subjects such as vulnerability, stigmatized erotic desires and childhood memories: the conversations were often emotionally intense and exhaustive, involving laughter as well as tears. Like other dancing ethnographers (cf. Beattie et al., 2005), I was, however, at times also struck by the insider–outsider dilemma. Where were my loyalties? Did I betray my new tango friends and dance partners by also having sociological ambitions? Or were the dancing delights I experienced during fieldwork a sign of me being an untrustworthy scientist? My response has been to remain open about my research objectives, while not, however, inhibiting myself from also being a dancer, in the moment fully absorbed by movement and music just to, the following day, approach my late-night dances and fieldnotes more distantly through the lenses of theory and research questions. ⁸

Transitory semi-anonymous dancing attachments

This dialogue, collected from a WNYC-coverage on tango in New York, addresses a culture formed around what the reporter calls an ‘instant intimacy between perfect strangers’. ‘Instant intimacy’ and ‘a three-minute love affair’ are allegories describing consecrated moments as temporary states of which the emotional intensity presumably is strong enough to comport an entire love story in a very short time-frame. As suggested by Martin in the quote above, the so-called milongas are organized also so as to offer semi-anonymous attachments primarily lived in the glances crossing the dance floor and through connections created by touch and joint movement – ‘you could be anybody … nobody really cares’. In New York and other highly transitory cities spaces like Buenos Aires and San Francisco, where parts of the fieldwork were carried out, large numbers of people come and go and it often happen that close-embrace dancers never meet again. This partly has to do with the structuring of the dance events, which most often are divided into so-called tandas: dance sets of three songs. Although it happens that couples dance more than one set in a row, the informal rule is to change partner every third song and thereafter search for a new companion.

As stressed in the NY-dialogue, the semi-anonymity has to do with the dancers’ prime interest in dancing, and less so the person that offers her or his embrace. Contrary to verbal disclosure, by some stressed to be paradigmatic for late-modern intimacy (Giddens, 1992), many dancers perceive information about a partner as irrelevant for an intimate attachment to emerge. Instead of words, they use a sensual language based on kinetic and musical grammar, less qualified for manifesting reflexive aspects of self. Some even claim that they experience more profound connection when they dance with complete strangers, as, for instance, when they frequent tango scenes in other cities. One consequence of this, together with the dancers’ praise of dancing skills and sentiment, is that a kind of intimacy that would hardly find the same social acceptance in other settings emerges. In tango, dancers who define themselves as heterosexual report sensual moments in same-sex constellations and most participants dance across social divides related to age, class and ethnicity. The ways in which tango is organized make people who would not approach each other intimately in other milieus, find ways of orienting themselves to one another. Magdalena, for instance, describes the particular attraction as opening up a spectrum of intimate others:

Tango thereby stands as an example of attachments that diverge from dominant narratives also in regard to numerical composition. The dancehalls display an intimacy that initially mirrors iconic two-parts relations, such as the romantic couple, but unfolds as harbouring a rather non-exclusive culture somewhat similar to polyamorous communities (Klesse, 2007). In fact, the dancing dyad is organized according to a principle of seriality that works against the couple. From the first beginner class, dancers learn to incorporate a bodily rhythm marked by a flow of different partners. Akin to what Arlie Hochschild (1979) describes as feeling rules, the device ‘Change partner!’ every third song creates routines and emotional acceptance around the shift of intimate other. The institutionalized tanda creates a natural end-point to the dance embrace and thereby enables, for some, a sense of reliance that makes them at ease engaging in bodily and emotional dialogues with a stream of new partners. Moreover, the restricted dancing space, marking boundaries towards the external world, assists the intimate devotion. ¹⁰ According to a Colombian woman living in Sweden, people in her local tango community use the emotional safety to access a closeness that is difficult to gain elsewhere. ‘This fear of hugging, of getting close to strangers … hugging someone here is like hugging a rock, but once on the dance floor people take the chance, they dream away in the embrace and want to get close close’ (Angelica, 53-year-old, Sweden).

However, dancers are not intimate with all potential partners. In tango it is quite common to decline invitations; in addition, all chest-to-chest dancing is not wished to be experienced intimately. This creates a sense of exclusivity and trust when dancers manage to find the ‘chosen-one-partner’. The fact that a selection process structures finding a partner, partly based on status within the tango economy, makes intimacy a scarce resource (Törnqvist, 2013). For some, the constant shift of partners assures continuous surprise and makes dancers like Kate from San Francisco explain the strength of tango as: ‘You never get bored … The beauty is that the honeymoon never ends, you just shift the partner.’ Others describe the culture, for the exact same reasons, to be cold. Some speak of the dance as superficial and the emotional kicks as means of simple recognition. This as an elitist culture, they claim, which prioritizes the same young fit bodies as elsewhere.

Conclusion

Both scholars who criticize the shifts associated with late-modernity and those who are more careful in their judgement tend to praise long-term bonds based on informal contracts of responsibility and care. It is, for instance, partly on the basis of a failing temporality that Zygmunt Bauman and Mary Evans criticize contemporary constructions of love by arguing that these are not accountable over time and that they dissolve into shallow entertainment. It is with similar arguments that friendship bonds have gained a rising interest and status among intimacy and family sociologists. ¹¹ In this article I have addressed intimacy from the lens of a culture that diverges from such ideals while also proving to offer attachments on which people depend for living. Although most dancers leave the tango clubs without promises of durable bonds with individual partners, many carry with them a strong sensation of having experienced attachments that ‘touch the personal world very deeply’ (Plummer, 2003: 13). Returning to Berlant’s call for a rethinking exercise, tango offers an intimate liveability while encompassing experience and imagination outside dominant scripts. The semi-anonymous transitory attachments reflect aspects of those mobile processes that take place ‘on the street, on the phone, in fantasy, at work, but rarely register as anything but residue’ (Berlant, 2000: 3). Although short in time and lived in fairly anonymous environments, the attachments are often described as deep experiences connecting the dancer not only with a partner but with profound dimensions of self and relations outside the dance floor. As 45-year-old Kate from San Francisco puts it, dancing comprises ‘layers and layers of communication. Tango is a conversation about existentialism.’

Addressing tango in terms of an intimate sociality, rather than a set of relationships, helps open up the analytical spectra. The approach helps us set eyes not only on the various aspects of closeness experienced between dancers in a couple, but unfolds intimacy to be a more complex web of emotions and attachments, involving entire dance-clubs, the floor on which the tangueras and tangueros move as well as their own (historic) body. Additionally, tango is both a lively metaphor for a skin-to-skin intimacy placed in a defined spatial and temporal situation, and a dancing practice that makes use of fantasy and memory in ways that confound notions of space and time. The dance floor allows for an intimate presence that is lived through the touch and presence of temporary dance partners, as well as through imagination comporting childhood memories and fragments of lost love. Additionally, rather than being lived spontaneously or in strictly formalized ways, dancers enter into play through the existence of already defined rules and rituals, but rather than restraining movement, the rules are primarily perceived as risk-reducing conditions that help them to engage more emotionally in the intimate tango embrace.

Although tango may appear as an exceptional and somewhat exotic case on the margins of late-modern life, the accounts discussed in this article could be used to address also other contemporary experiences of intimacy. In fact, the dim-lit dancehalls urge us to consider the significance of semi-anonymous ephemeral attachments. Dancing unfolds a challenging prism also for disputing the great interest in verbal disclosure and self-reflexive narration within sociological discourses on late-modern intimacy, by suggesting the importance also of touch and skin-to-skin conversations. Moreover, tango illuminates the function of seriality and collective bonds beyond the dyad, and, finally, it displays the role of memory and imagination in intimate attachments.