Queer Tango Space Minority Stress, Sexual Potentiality, and Gender Utopias Juliet Mcmains
Queer Tango Space Minority Stress, Sexual Potentiality, and Gender Utopias Juliet McMains Tango Queer, San Telmo, Buenos Aires 16 October 2012 It is nearing 11:00 p.m., still early by tango time, when I duck into the dark entryway at 571 Perú in San Telmo, Buenos Aires’s oldest neighborhood. Once home to Argentina’s wealthy elite, by the early 1900s San Telmo housed the city’s diverse immigrant community. Italians, Russians, English, Spaniards, and Germans were crammed into its many conventillos (tenement houses). Whether it was the poverty, the homesickness, or the shared language of an evolving new music that drew the immigrants together, San Telmo became a crucible for the develop- ment of tango. It was a temporary means of staving off loneliness and despair by throwing one- self into a stranger’s arms as the wail of the bandoneón pressed the pair into motion. By 1912, San Telmo was teeming with tango in its streets, bars, dance halls, and brothels. By 2012, most milongas (tango dances) had moved closer to tourist-oriented venues in the fashionable neigh- borhood of Palermo. However, a few stalwarts remain in San Telmo, including Tango Queer, a Figure 1. Dancers at Tango Queer, Buenos Aires, 2012. (Photo by Léa Hamoignon) TDR: The Drama Review 62:2 (T238) Summer 2018. ©2018 Juliet McMains 59 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00748 by guest on 26 September 2021 weekly milonga held since 2007 where the roles of leader and follower are not assigned based on gender. According to founder Mariana Docampo’s manifesto, published in Spanish and English on the Tango Queer website, “we take for granted neither your sexual orientation nor your choice of one role or the other.
[Show full text]