Queering Tango: Glitches in the Hetero-National Matrix of a Liminal Cultural Production

This essay unveils a notorious gender ambiguity in the early tango culture, anxiously covered up by a practice that dramatizes the binarism of heterosexuality in an almost parodic way. The study identifies ruptures in this cultural production, historically construed as an iconic and normalizing referent in the formation of a modern national, gendered identity in Argentina (1900–30), promoted by an active interaction between the culture industry and its audiences/consumers. This exchange reflected the need in the public sphere for the creation of a modern feminine identity remarkably documented in the performativity of “public” women—for the purposes of this essay, women tango singers. These performers became a raging success in the stages of commercial theatres, the cabaret scene, and the radio and film industries. While singing mostly a repertoire of male-authored lyrics that delivered a message of control over modern women’s independence, the public availability of their performing bodies contradicted the representation of abjection, prostitution, and destruction suffered by the women represented in the tango lyrics they sang. In addition, their practice of cross-dressing provided a strong vernacular model that was not devoid of gender contradictions, as it defied national canons of female beauty and sexuality. Female working-class audiences felt identified with these cross-dressed actresses and singers, and were furthermore pleased to see mimicked onstage forlorn vernacular types that affirmed a national identity: the slick compadrito, and the more exotic gaucho style. This embracing of a popular national aesthetic in the midst of the internationalization of tango diverted attention from the mischievous gender-play that Argentine audiences would at the time deny as being the reflection of a hidden gender ambiguity. These women tango singers have consequently become living documents of a fissure in the heteronormativity of the apparently seamless identity construction of the modern Argentine nation.