Dancing Tango

Kathy Davis is Senior Research Fellow in the Sociology Department of the VU University in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. She is the author of numerous books, including The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders.

"Daviss participant-informant status serves her well as she describes the subtle communication that goes on chest to chest as the dancers use of wordless cues to make adjustments and improvise, and the engrossing safety of their embrace." (Women's Review of Books) "Davis has written a superb, complex, and stimulating book. She obliges all of us to think." (The Queer Tango Book Project) "Hopefully this wonderful and creative book will get many more people on to the dance floor. And not just hopping about any old how in lonely (but usually crowded) isolation, but engaging in learning the rules of dancing with a partner. No need to stand on your toes, or anyone elses; it is about extending the possibilities of what your mind and your body can do." (Times Literary Supplement) "[P]assionately written." (Dance Research Journal) "[] Dancing Tango is an engaging book where tango is quite rightly taken seriously as a social and cultural phenomenon. This book displays a thoroughly readable style, which is at times playful and humorous. Davis does not shy away from potentially difficult, personal, intimate, or emotional topics, and this keeps the reader engaged." (American Journal of Sociology) "A thoughtful and enjoyable study of tango in Argentina and Amsterdam goes beyond the history of the dance to explore the possibilities and perils of bodies, passion, gender, and identity in the modern transnational world." (Anthropology Review Database) "Providing us with a sensual, groundbreaking and highly accessible account of how the global phenomenon of Argentinean tango is implicated in a desire for a liminal experience of embodied connectivity in music, Kathy Davis places her global ethnography in a context that explores the intersections between the politics of passion, performance, gender, and transnational connections, power-relations and imaginaries. This compelling study will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students interested in feminist sociology, ethnography, sexuality, embodiment and globalization." - Chris Shilling,author of The Body and Social Theory

• Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1.Salon Cultures 19 2. Tango Passion 48 3. Tango Trajectories 74 4. Performing Femininity, Performing Masculinity 100 5. Queering Tango 127 6. Transnational Encounters 155 Epilogue: Should a Feminist Dance Tango? 183 Notes 193 References 209 Index 219 About the Author 225