Abstract
Sociologists have investigated the connections between dance and various social inequalities, including those involving race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, age, and body type (Hancock 2013; Hazzard-Gordon 1992; Thomas 2003). They have examined the impact of social processes associated with modernity on dance techniques and practices as well as the circulation and influence of dance in various contexts (Hammond and Hammond 1979; Thomas 1995; Ward 1997). Sociologists also have used dance to analyze meanings associated with the body and “bodily symbolism” (Thomas 1995:166). Kathy Davis’s compelling book, Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World, adds to this literature and the discipline, as it uses dance to examine “globalization from below” (p. 180), identity, gender, and sexuality. Illustrating what Ananya Chatterjea (2015) termed the “micropolitics of [dance] technique,” Davis’s book shows how various interests and desires are embodied in and impact the practice and global circulation of tango.
Using an ethnographic approach, influenced by the carnal sociology of Loïc Wacquant and global ethnography of Michael Burawoy, Davis examines tango and tango salons in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires as “transnational cultural space[s]” (p.1). These spaces, for Davis, allow for a different form of sociality, where practitioners can engage in embodied exchanges across “national and cultural borders” (p. 9). Although Davis’s observations are weighted heavily toward the practitioners in or from Amsterdam, she argues that tango offers practitioners in both cities an escape from ordinary life—a sense of “elsewhere-ness” for dancers in Amsterdam or “past-ness” for dancers in Buenos Aires (p. 41)—and the “costs of late modernity” (p. 126). Tango, for Davis, is a “cultural product” and symbol of Argentinian national identity and culture,“argentinidad” (p. 9). Nevertheless, Davisstates that there are two versions of argentinidad—one that is “inward-looking, rural, and traditional” (p. 175) and another that is “urban, modern, and cosmopolitan” (p. 176)—which produces tensions in the field and impacts the interests and desires that practitioners bring to tango. International films that feature tango, which shape and are shaped by global and “cultural imaginaries” (p. 8), also impact the expectations that practitioners bring to tango salons. Davis argues, however, that these representations of tango in film that make the dance an “effective and widespread metaphor for heterosexual passion” (p. 102) are different from the meanings generated through the experience of dancing tango, which she explores in her book.
Three analytical frames divide Dancing Tango’s six chapters and epilogue: passion, gender, and transnationality. Davis explores the production and experience of passion in Chapters Two and Three. Music, embrace, dialogue, and connection are four elements that help dancers experience passion in tango, which pulls them to the “threshold between the old (their ordinary lives and personae and social arrangements) and the new (a connection that is like no other and yet doomed to be over in a few minutes)” (p. 68). This liminal state, Davis argues, allows partners to experience passion and generates such a longing that it can change the “trajectory” of a practitioner’s life (p.77). Davis, therefore, discusses the “repair work” (p. 86) and “adjustment strategies” (p. 90) that dancers engage in as they try to make sense of the way tango “disorders” (p. 86) their lives, moving some to relocate to and many to at least visit Buenos Aires.
In Chapters Four and Five, Davis explores gender and sexuality in tango practices and salon cultures. Through an examination of dress and gender divisions in tango (e.g., men leading and women following), Davis analyzes how and why practitioners perform masculinity, femininity, and heterosexual desire in salons. Davis argues that the cultural and economic shifts of late modernity changed gender roles in both Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, causing practitioners to long for and perform heteronormative, outdated gender roles in tango that may not reflect their everyday lives. Davis states that some of the heteronormative, gendered conventions that are acceptable in “traditional” tango in Buenos Aires are not as acceptable in Amsterdam due to a normative commitment to gender equality, even though this does not always reflect actual gender relations in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, some of these conventions are challenged in “queer tango” (p. 129) in Buenos Aires. Davis argues that queering is a strategy where dancers trouble the emphasis on men or one partner leading by emphasizing partners switching who leads during a dance. Additionally, dancers queer tango by creating spaces that are open to individuals with LGBTQIA identities. Davis argues that queering is an act of cultural politics that performs the important work of challenging heteronormativity but does not necessarily disrupt larger structural inequalities around gender and sexuality in the field of tango.
In Chapter Six, Davis examines the role of the body and bodily practices in the production of transnational connections and global culture. Davis is particularly interested in countering the idea of an “exoticizing colonial gaze” (p. 174), which she says dominates the scholarship on tango as well as discussions of cultural flows between the global North and South. Davis acknowledges that tango is not “free from the North-South divisions produced by global capitalism” or the “asymmetries in power shaped by race, class, and gender” (p. 181). However, she focuses on how and why dancers in both Buenos Aires and Amsterdam enter the field with their own particular set of desires, expectations, and beliefs about each other, which shape and are shaped by dance practices. Davis suggests that these “disparate and differently situated individual dancers… . [create] transnational connections . . . [which are] . . . passionate encounter[s] across many different borders between dancers with a shared desire for difference and a taste of ‘elsewhere’” (p. 181). Thus, Davis thinks that the concept of “cosmopolitan disposition” is a better way to make sense of what interests dancers in both Buenos Aires and Amsterdam in tango (p. 181). I would have liked Davis to further explore possible connections between a colonial gaze and cosmopolitan dispositions.
Although Davis has written an interesting book and uses strong empirical evidence to support her claims, there are a number of limitations. Because Davis spends so much time differentiating her own analysis fromthe postcolonial critique of tango, she risks glossing over important connections between this literature and her own work. Additionally, Davis’s critique of the postcolonial critique of tango, as seemingly “more ideologically motivated than empirically grounded” (p. 169), is a distortion of a complex and interdisciplinary analysis of tango. A second limitation is that Davis does not talk enough about the development of or struggles over “traditional” tango. It is not until the end of the book that she writes about three generations of tango practitioners in Buenos Aires; however, she does not discuss the impact of these different generations on tango practices, particularly on what gets constructed as traditional tango. Davis also does not discuss where the salons she studied are located in both cities or what audiences they target and how this might impact dance practices and salon cultures. Despite these limitations, Davis has written an enjoyable and engaging book that will be useful for scholars studying gender, sexuality, culture, the body, dance, the arts, and globalization.