The Passion of Music and Dance by William Washabaugh

Author:William Washabaugh [Washabaugh, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781859739099
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 1998-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

A Sad Thought

Most tango-practitioners and tango-scholars are more or less open to reading tango as transgressive in terms of gender, class, race or morals, but the costuming and posturing practices of the international tango scene usually remain safely heterosexual. Meanwhile, homosocial tangodancing - common at tango's primal scenes and in its contemporary practice - is studiously disassociated from the famous eroticism of tango. Salessi, however, suggests that tango's homoerotic roots continue to inform tango's paradoxical passion. 'Considered from the present moment, in the context of this history of the tango, is not this sense of loss, this yearning for a "legendary skill", this "mournful cry for that which is lost and gone" a nostalgia for homosexual desire lost in the sanitization of a forbidden dance?' (Salessi 1997: 168). Much as Salessi recognizes in tango, a 'mournful cry for that which is lost and gone', Savigliano recognizes that 'Machismo is a cult of "authentic virility" fed by a sense of loss' (Savigliano 1995: 43).

Judith Butler argues that a sense of loss is endemic to heterosexuality, which is marked by 'a mourning for unlived possibilities' (Butler 1995: 27). Butler is referring to the heterosexual's unlived possibilities of homosexual love. It would, for example, be possible to interpret Borges's reference to 'a disturbed / Unreal past that in some way is certain, / The impossible memory of having died / Fighting', as the expression of a related feeling: the feeling of losing what one could never have had. For Butler, Borges's 'impossible memory' would be symptomatic of heterosexuality, since it is always 'haunted by the love it cannot grieve' (Ibid.: 26). The straight man can not grieve the forfeiture of homosexual love because he can not acknowledge ever having wanted homosexual love. Developing Freud's reflections on mourning and melancholia, Butler coins the term 'gender melancholy' to refer to the straight man's incomplete mourning for the gay man he might have been. 'When the prohibition against homosexuality is culturally pervasive, then the "loss" of homosexual love is precipitated through a prohibition which is repeated and ritualized throughout the culture. What ensues is a culture of gender melancholy in which masculinity and femininity emerge as the traces of an ungrieved and ungrievable love' (Ibid.: 28). In other words, 'The straight man becomes (mimes, cites, appropriates, assumes the status of) the man he "never" loved and "never" grieved' (Ibid.: 34). Straight gender identities, according to Butler, are attempts to compensate for the forfeiture of homosexual desire. Butler theorizes identification and desire as two sides of the same coin. Her argument is that a straight man's masculine identification is a compensation for not being able to desire other men. The identification is melancholic because the lost attraction is not acknowledged, and therefore can not be properly mourned. According to Butler, straight people's hyperbolic gender displays - such as the pimps and whores performed by tangueros in San Francisco - result from the denial of same-sex desire.

Thus, following Butler, it could be argued that tango's repressed homoeroticism is a driving force behind tango's hyperbolic displays of masculinity and femininity.

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