Re: Gender Roles in Tango

[Marianne Hansen <mhansen @BRYNMAWR.EDU>]

  Leonardo De Leon wrote:

>>My wife and I recently gave a lecture and set of demos on tango in a 
>>university ethnomusicology class. One of the students, who decided 
>>thereafter to write her term paper on gender roles in tango ......

>>I would be interested in list members' understanding of gender roles in 
>>tango. If you have historical information and can provide your source 
>>(book, article, word of mouth an expert on tango history and culture), I 
>>would appreciate it.

Dear Leonardo,

It must be a fun class, to have demos and all.  I think it's great that you 
are going to go on and help the student out, also.  A couple of ideas come 
to me (as a person who assists students to do research as part of my job) 
which I thought I would share.  As some of them are references to 
interesting papers and books on tango, I have ventured to post to the list, 
rather than just write you personally.

The first thing I thought when I saw your message was that the student is 
gong to have to be careful to think about where and when 'tango' happens if 
she wants to write on gender issues.  I think that the postings just on 
this list are sufficient evidence (and she might enjoy reading the 
archives) that gender relations within the dance are different at different 
times in history and that they are different right now at different places 
in the world.  Even strictly within a male-leader, female-follower pattern, 
we see there are differences in the dynamic of the relationship between 
modern Buenos Aires, America, Holland, and Japan.  And, of course, there 
are differences between individuals and couples within any given locale 
also.  I dance in Philadelphia and in recent milongas I have seen lots of 
men leading and women following,  women leading other women fairly 
frequently, two men dancing together (unusual but more than once), powerful 
and active female community leaders, a man who asked another man for 
permission to dance with his wife, and a man who told his wife when to step 
out to join a birthday dance.  This is not a community which I would feel 
comfortable having represented to your student by someone who wanted to lay 
down the law by pontificating about how 'tango' is.  She needs to consider 
clearly whether she will talk about the past, the present, or the image 
presented in literature or film, about location, and about what she will 
accept as sources.

The second thing is that I would advise you to be careful about 
interpreting too much for the student.  I don't know whether she wants to 
do fieldwork (in which case you might usefully introduce her to your 
community) or academic research.  If the latter, she will find that there 
actually is some interesting work already being done which she can find 
through ordinary research channels.  (If she will go to her library for 
help, great!  If not, you might whisper the names of a couple of these 
resources to her: her library catalog, Historical Abstracts, Women's 
Resources International, Hispanic American Periodicals Index, Arts and 
Humanities Search).  And here is a brief list of publications that I have 
just pulled out of these tools which might interest her:

Books:
Tango and the political economy of passion / Marta E. Savigliano
Paper tangos / Julie Taylor
Antropología del tango: los protagonistas / María Susana Azzi

Papers:
3 papers from The Passion of Music and Dance: Body, Gender and Sexuality -- 
Oxford, New York: Berg, 1998:
         From Wallflowers to Femmes Fatales: Tango and the Performance of 
Passionate Femininity / Marta E. Savigliano.
         Tobin, Jeffrey. Tango and the scandal of homosocial desire / 
Jeffrey Tobin.
         Castro, Donald.  Carlos Gardel and the Argentine tango: the lyric 
of social irresponsibility and male inadequacy
                 / Donald Castro.

Tango / by Julie Taylor.  In: Cultural anthropology -- Washington, D.C. v. 
2, no. 4, 1987, p.481-493, ISSN 0886-7356.

Tango and the Postmodern Uses of Passion / Marta E. Savigliano, In: 
Cruising the performative : interventions into the representation of 
ethnicity, nationality,  and sexuality / edited by Sue-Ellen Case, Philip 
Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 
c1995, p.130-.

A dissertation:
Tobin, Jeffrey P.Manly Acts: Buenos Aires, 24 March 1996 
(Argentina,   Masculinity, Asado, Soccer, Tango, National Identity).

And give her my best wishes!
Marianne Hansen

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