Argentine Queer Tango: Dance and Sexuality Politics in Buenos Aires by Mercedes Liska (review)

In 2003 I visited Buenos Aires and stayed in a small "gay-friendly" hostel near the city's oldest quarter, San Telmo, the home of many tango clubs and milongas (tango-dancing venues). I was in for a nice surprise—the hostel featured a weekly "gay milonga" where same-sex couples dance the tango. Nowadays, more than a decade later, queer tango is a well-known phenomenon.

Mercedes Liska's timely book is an engaging and fluent "labor of love" introduction to queer tango, written from a personal perspective and, as such, concentrating on the female experience. Liska combines in this book an engaging socio-musical ethnography; historical, social, and political perspectives; and feminist, gender, and queer theory analysis.

The book is laden with passion, just like the music and dance it explores. The author's own passion for tango in general and queer tango in particular does not conflict with her self-acknowledged heterosexuality, and the initial discomfort dealing with "the heterosexual anxiety generated by queer tango" (xi) and having to explain to her dance partners her interest in the phenomenon.

Liska contextualizes the evolution of queer tango in Buenos Aires in the changing modalities in nocturnal socialization between 2000 and 2012, strongly connected to the political and social changes in Argentina, including the evolution of the feminist agenda, civil rights, and LGBTQ activism.

The first chapter describes the tango revival, or as Liska terms it "recovery" (2), in Buenos Aires in the 1990s and the way it introduces "new dance corporealities" (xi). Tango provided, she claims, "a refuge from the neoliberal individualism that dominated the 1990s" (4) and a source of shared passion providing an escapist space from the harsh reality, making "a discouraging reality more bearable" (11).

Chapter 2 takes us back in time to the modernization era of tango (1900–1920), when the canonical form of modern tango was shaped. Social morality, or in fact the "immorality" of tango, was a major issue affecting its status in the early twentieth century. It was alleged to have "given rise to social relations that threatened the established order: Social classes mixed promiscuously, eroticism was collectivized, genders inverted, and the dance itself was incompatible with the cultural requirements demanded by the new nation-state" (23).

Tango moved from being prohibited and banned to being accepted under prescribed rules, one of which was the "heterosexual norm." In a subsection under this title, Liska describes how the "acceptable" early tango "expressed a stylized physical domination of the female partner" (37) with a clear leader-and-follower role division.

In premodern tango, however, male-male and even female-female dancing was practiced and documented. Liska briefly mentions this phenomenon and even claims that "male couple dancing tango today is customarily justified historically" (39). I would have loved to hear more about it, especially when the author sets up the historical background for current queer tango.

Chapter 3 jumps forward in time to the contemporary scene, the evolution of queer tango and its spreading by word of mouth in the 1990s, its coming to fruition and media attention in the 2000s, and its links to equal rights activism and to current gender and sexuality discourses and politics in Argentina. This strong link is emphasized in the chapter's subtitle, "Gender Activism in Dance Form" (47).

Liska argues that initially male-only queer tango practice was conceived of as a social occasion, whereas "the female experience was structured around intellectual and political affinities" (48), but with time these differences became blurred. If this is indeed the case, it needs further elaboration: Why was the female version more activist or political? Does it reflect a feminist agenda? Countermachismo?

Chapter 4 features innovations in the tango world, mainly electronic tango and the way it was received in Argentina and affected bodily stylization.

Queer tango's...