Queer tango - Bent history? The late-modern uses and abuses of historical imagery showing men dancing tango with other men

Batchelor, Ray; Mulholland, Jon

Abstract

Ascend the winding stair to LugarGay, an LGBT Community Centre in Buenos Aires and queer tango venue, and you pass a reproduction of an old photograph of men, wearing aprons, in a market, posing in tango couples. Elsewhere in Buenos Aires, a cropped version in a glass case at the National Museum of Dance & Hall of Fame is labelled ‘Baile popular en el Abasto (c. 1910)’. Yet another photograph of men in a street, some standing, some posing in couples, with a seated bandoneon player is a still more well-known example of this genre: historical images of men not dancing but posing with each other as tango couples. Marked, especially since the ‘Tango Renaissance’ (the ‘Tango Renaissance’ refers to the period of intense renewed interest in tango immediately following the fall in 1983 of the military dictatorship in Argentina, in part, a function of the need to reconstruct Argentinian identity), as documenting important dimensions of tango’s de facto history, their meanings remain contested. Drawing on a methodology of visual ethnography, this chapter examines how historical photographic and non-photographic representations of male, same-sex tango dancing are deployed in contemporary, late-modern contexts. Specifically, it will examine the manner in which these are used in both ‘mainstream’ and ‘queer’ tango-related web and publicity contexts variably to confirm or contest an ‘official history of tango’. We will show that in the hands of a social media-driven international queer tango community, such historical representations of men dancing tango form an emergent queer iconography that seeks to reclaim and re-visualise emplaced cultural memories marginalised, in the name of an ascendant queer contemporary.

Citation

Batchelor, R., & Mulholland, J. (2021). Queer tango - Bent history? The late-modern uses and abuses of historical imagery showing men dancing tango with other men. In C. Parfitt (Ed.), Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget (101-119). Basingstoke UK: Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71083-5_6

• Acceptance Date: Aug 26, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Dec 10, 2021
• Publication Date: Dec 10, 2021
• Deposit Date: Dec 9, 2021
• Pages: 101-119
• Series Title: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies
• Series ISSN: 2634-6257
• Book Title: Cultural Memory and Popular Dance: Dancing to Remember, Dancing to Forget
• Chapter Number: 6
• ISBN: 9783030710828
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71083-5_6
• Keywords: Queer Tango Popular Dance
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/8213014
• Publisher URL: https://www.springer.com/series/14682