Tourism and the Globalization of Emotions

The Intimate Economy of Tango

Maria Törnqvist

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138952423
• eBook ISBN: 9781136731891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Today, an increasing number of people from all over the world travel to Buenos Aires to dance tango. To accommodate these intimate voyagers, tourist agencies offer travel packages, including classes in tango instruction, dance shoe shopping, and special city maps pointing out the tango clubs in town. Some of these agencies even provide "taxi dancers" — mainly Argentine men, who make a living by selling themselves as dance escorts to foreign women on a short term stay. Based on a cheek-to-cheek ethnography of intimate life in the tango clubs of Buenos Aires, this book provides a passionate exploration of tango — its sentiments and symbolic orders — as well as a critical investigation of the effects of globalization on intimate economies. Throughout the chapters, the author assesses how, in an explosive economic and political context, people's emotional lives intermingle with a tourism industry that has formed at the intersection of close embrace dances and dollars. Bringing economies of intimacy centre stage, the book describes how a global condition is lived bodily, emotionally and politically, and offers a rich, provocative contribution to theorizing today's global flows of people, money, and fragile dreams. As the narrative charts a course across a sea of intense, immediate emotional sensations, taken-for-granted ideas about sex, romance and power twist and turn like the steps of the tango.

Part I
Introduction

1 Intimate Voyages in Global Times

INTRODUCTION

Why study tango dancing? And why make a sociological case out of the streams of dancers who go on tango holiday to Buenos Aires?

The answer proposed by this book is that tango dancing constitutes a sensual metaphor for the mutually constitutive relations between intimacy and globalization. The Argentine tango provides a striking example of an unsettled internationalized culture that was carried across national borders long before social scientists invented the word “globalization”. The tango is danced on the edge of a vulgar and immoral intimacy, forming its steps into a dangerous play revolving around sexualized representations and exoticism as well as artistic values and rigorous dance training. At center stage in tango is the emotional experience transmitted through the intimate dance embrace, the improvised dancing style and the dramatized Argentine music. When framing the tango in terms of a dance voyage to Buenos Aires, however, the nexus of intimacy and globalization shifts slightly and changes color. In fact, adding elements of the holiday experience evokes a number of dilemmas at the heart of our time. How is the quest for emotionality affected by the economic realities exposed through the relations in tourism? How is tango intimacy affected by the fact that the dancers are no longer only dancers but also wealthy and poor, clients and service providers within a market of intimate services and cultural goods? And what happens when a tourist industry attempts to annex feelings and symbolic values such as authenticity?

Today, an increasing number of people from all over the world travel to Buenos Aires to dance and explore tango culture.¹ According to an Argentine survey from 2001, between ten and fifteen thousand people travel to Buenos Aires to dance tango every year. Most likely, the numbers have doubled, or more, over the past decade. According to reports from the World Travel and Tourism Council together with tourism studies and travel magazine surveys, Buenos Aires and Argentina are showing strong growth in the area of tourism and top several lists of the world's most popular tourist destinations. This might be related to the fact that Argentina became a fairly cheap travel destination—and site for tourist investments—in the aftermath of the economic crisis in 2001. Although Argentina has one of the strongest economies in Latin America, and is normally spoken of as a “European” nation with a luxurious lifestyle compared with other Latin-American countries, it is still coping with the adverse effects of the economic collapse (Fiszbein et al. 2002; Whitson 2007). Besides spurring unemployment and migration streams to Europe, the crisis has created a national attempt to attract foreign capital, particularly through international tourism, and has resulted in requisites to create all kinds of job opportunities. Tango has thus become a source of income and an expanding market in the informal tourist sector.

Among those travelers who are coming specifically for the tango, a broad repertoire of practices and experiences related to tango make up the core of the holiday journey. Besides taking private classes taught by some of the world's best tango dancers and exploring past and present tango culture—its music, poetry, people and places—most tango tourists dance their nights away in the dimly lit dance-halls, the so-called milongas. To accommodate these intimate voyagers, a market of tango services and goods has emerged. More advanced dancers pick and choose from a selected number of services, whereas beginners can purchase travel packages which include classes in tango instruction, dance-shoe shopping and special city maps pointing out the tango clubs in town. In fact, the dance tourists' desire to access the “deep emotions” of the dancing culture has turned tango into an expansive business.

Drawing on a cheek-to-cheek ethnography of so-called tango tourism in Buenos Aires, this book explores some of the imprints of globalization and market adjustments on local cultures. It seeks to of er a passionate exploration of Argentine tango dancing through the lens of its sentiments and symbolic orders, and a critical investigation of international tourism's effects on intimate economies. Through comprehensive fieldwork in Argentina as well as in two local dancing communities in the U.S. and Sweden, this project maps a complex social, emotional and political landscape. Throughout the chapters, the book assesses the ways in which people's emotional lives intermingle with a tourism market made up of close-embrace dances and dollars as well as of an explosive economic and political Argentine reality. The intimate tango voyages evoke a world beyond the steps of the dance-field, stretching into social formations and embracing multiple conflicts and dilemmas. By bringing economies of intimacy center stage, and exploring the macro-and micro-power dynamics at work, this book seeks to identify a global condition that is lived on and through the body.

Moreover, tango tourism represents an intriguing case for exploring intimacy as a social form. The tango harbors promises of a heart-to-heart communication that evokes existential dwelling at the same time that the social organization of the dancing of ers easy exits based on the primate of emotional thrills. Tango dancing seems in fact ostensibly well suited for what is sometimes described as late-modern societies, characterized by individualism, flexibility and emotionally centered cultures (Bauman 1998, 2003; Giddens 1992; Illouz 2007). In addition, tango includes a provocative association with sex. The dancing, with its close-embrace movements involving the dancers' legs wrapped around each other, is often used as a metaphor for sexualized feelings. Adding various aspects of tourism to the study of this edgy intimacy evokes a number of questions. In fact, one particular aim of this book is to explore and make sense of a stream of tourism that blurs the boundaries between affectionate and economic relations. Although the relationships in tango tourism, emerging in the Argentine dance-halls, rarely lead to sexual af airs or temporary romances, they are still part of a globalized skin-to-skin intimacy. In addition, the relations between local hobby dancers and tourists initiated at the milongas rarely involve economic transactions; still, they are affected by an expanding market of intimate dance services and the consequences of economic hardship. In that sense, tango voyages put at stake not only how gender, race and class are intersecting in the making of a tourism geography, but also sheds light on the implications of a globalized world for our intimate lives. The intimate practices, discourses and sets of emotions produced in this particular context unfold into a complex landscape of market forces, dollars and close-embrace dancing.

THEORIZING TANGO TOURISM

The growing academic interest in dancing must be related to the body-turn in the social sciences and humanities. In a theme issue in the international journal Ethnography on so-called “physical cultures”, John Hughson describes this as another term for catching “the human body as a site of social meaning” (2008: 422). There are increasing attempts to embrace the social significance of dancing. Some scholars relate it to traditions such as cultural theory (Thomas 2003), postcolonial theory (Sawyer 2006) and phenomenology (Parviainen 2002). Among them is a strong interest in dancing, not least couple dancing, from the angle of gender and sexuality studies. In work targeting various dance forms and cultural contexts, researchers are approaching the bodily movements of individual dancers and larger group dynamics as an arena for resistance and reproduction of dominant ideologies. One example, drawing on Leslie Gotfrit's (1988) study of women and the so-called “politics of pleasure” in a Canadian dance-club, is Jonathan Skinner's follow-up case within the Belfast salsa community. Skinner argues for a shift in focus from seeing the dance as a “cathartic activity” and courtship to seeing it as “a choreographic play between resistance and self-regulation” (2008: 76). In a similar fashion, Lisa Wade argues that there is an emancipatory promise in couple-dancing. She explores a lindy-hop dancing community which is actively “re-shaping the collective body towards feminist ends” (2011: 224) through negotiations of power in the lead-follow dynamic. Looking into the literature on tango, we find that it often targets the rich culture of poetry and music, national history and tango as a lifestyle, especially around the turn of the last century (Denniston 2007; Goertzen and Azzi 1999; Guy 1995; Romano 2005; Rypka et al. 2005; Savigliano 1995a, 1995b; Taylor 1976; Thompson 2005). Still, a rather limited, though possibly expanding, group of studies has focused on the dance scene and its practices (Goodwin 1998; Hess 1998; Manning 2003; 2007; Taylor 1998), and among them few place the particular world of tango dancing within a broader context of social and political concerns (Olszewski 2008; Savigliano 1995a, 1995b; Viladrich 2005). We might also notice that some of the most prominent academic work on tango was written during the nineties and primarily targets the history of tango throughout the twentieth century. One example is Marta E. Savigliano's fascinating work Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995), which traces the development of tango from its birth in Buenos Aires to the Parisian finde siècle cabarets through the lens of feminist and postcolonial theories. The subtitle of this book—The Intimate Economy of Tango—creates a bond with Savigliano's important work, but frames the study within the contemporary tango culture and focuses on the imprints of tourism. I also wish to mention a beautiful essay by Julia Taylor, Paper Tangos (1998), which fuses the personal life of tango to a political chart of the Argentine military regime and historic economic hardship. However, much has happened since then. This book attempts to turn a page in the literature on tango and move on to the magnetism and antagonism making up the early twenty-first century's tango world.

Whereas the tango orchestras hit their golden age during the forties and fifties, today's brightest shining stars seem to be the internationally recognized tango dancers, constantly on tour around the world. In addition, tango is an everyday practice which finds more and more dedicated aficionados all over the world. As a consequence, Buenos Aires has become an expanding tourist site for cultural consumption. This book wishes to place the dancing and the culture within this broader geographic terrain and in the crosscutting intersections of tourism, embracing both commodification and the endeavor to retain tango as an autonomous art form. Throughout the chapters we will encounter a group of tango practitioners born far away from Rio de la Plata but with a strong commitment to the culture. Therefore, one difference between this and other studies on tango is that it is not tango perse, nor the history or the Argentine embeddedness of the tango, which is in focus, but rather the phenomenon of tango tourism. Moreover, my interest in tango does not revolve solely around the dancing experience, the bodily condition inscribed in tango as an art form and the social regulations shaping the dancing culture, but also addresses the nexus between tango dancing as an intimate social form and tourism as an expression of globalization. Hence this study wishes to build upon previous traditions in dance research and studies on tango as well as to provide new research angles, allowing a dance-field ethnography to resonate with larger sociological and political questions.

A limited number of studies have investigated the implications of globalization for tango. In a chapter in the 1999 Yearbook for Traditional Music, Chris Goertzen and María Susanna Azzi address the shifts in tango music and discuss its adaption to a global music scene. They touch upon the process through which “outsiders” in Argentina have become an important target group for the musicians and therefore also a possibly transformative force which might change the music and the working conditions for the musicians. They write: “Much of the modern support of the tango in its birthplace comes from outsiders, especially tourists, whose images of the tango must therefore be accommodated. The favourite music of today's poor in Buenos Aires is no longer the tango” (1999: 69). Another example is Anahí Viladrich's (2005) study of so-called Argentine tango immigrants in New York and the reciprocities of values exchanged between Argentine tango dancing artists and North-American hobby dancers. Also, the Argentine dance journeys are part of the globalizing of tango and might in fact add to the tendency of fracturing the culture. Implicit both in tango migration (out of Argentina) and tango tourism (to Argentina), is an intriguing relation between culture and geography. The spread of the tango and the increasing dance tourism in Argentina seem both to strengthen and challenge the territorial bonds between tango culture and Argentina. Although tango's national identity is stressed in the name—Argentine tango—the successful export demonstrates that the culture has made itself adoptable in various social and cultural environments throughout the world. As Erin Manning puts it in her captivating book on the “politics of touch”, in which tango dancing is used as an empirical prism, the tango is “at once fiercely nationalistic and startlingly inventive [ … ] a transcultural improvisation and a national artifact” (Manning 2007: xvii).

Although the global spread of tango is a crucial component of the expansion of Argentine dance tourism, the main purpose of this book is not to add another case to the study of “export-tango” through mechanisms of globalization. Instead, the scope is the holiday framing. Coupling tango dancing and tourism creates a number of dynamics which will be explored throughout this book. This intersection comprises practices and discourses, all of which both strengthen and challenge the alliance between tango and tourism. Starting with the similarities, we find an escapist framing to be present both in tango dancing and holiday travelling. In fact, both tango and tourism involve promises of a break with everyday routines, a voyage out of the ordinary. In addition, the cases of both dancing and travelling illustrate how spatial and bodily displacement evokes cultural and emotional dislocation. This is emphasized by the verbs “to move” and “being moved”, which imply that physical movements have an emotional dimension. This we might, in turn, relate to what some describe as the etymology of tango, being the Latin word tangere, meaning “to touch” (Manning 2003: 1). In that sense, dancing and travelling take place equally on earthly and existential terrains. They transport the subject through memorial, imaginative and emotional landscapes—as well as through geographic and political terrains. Furthermore, both dancing and tourism shape narratives for social metamorphosis, tempting its practitioners with radical transformations of selves.

However, the nexus between tango dancing and tourism also evokes conflict. One example of this is that the profane economic logic of a tourist market is, by some dancers, believed to create hindrances for a voyage out of the ordinary. Within the Argentine milongas and through the gazes of service laborers within the tango market, foreign dancers are not only passionate tango aficionados but also wealthy westerners and potential clients. Throughout this book, we will address the shift in public mirroring and self-image in relation to a number of dilemmas facing the tourists. It will in fact be argued that the context of holiday travelling makes the micro-politics of tango dancing an indicator of certain aspects of a fragile global order. The relations in tango tourism can help us to think more carefully not only about gendered aspects of this contested terrain, but also about how class and racial regimes pave the way for larger cultural and economic changes, as when dance tourism shapes new job markets and turns dancing into an economic relation. Such a focus suggests that the dancers are not only dancers, but also women and men, Argentines and Swedes, rich and poor, as well as to various degrees exoticized and sexualized bodies in an ongoing trade of dance partners and money. Far from representing a meditative embrace, the case of tango draws out the conflicting elements in both dancing and tourism. The dancers are bound to interact with class-related, gendered and racialized structures, and are hence far from one-layered carriers of the heterosexual emotionality associated with the tango. Moreover, the dance voyagers are part of ongoing negotiations which aim at evaluating, legitimizing and discrediting practices, artifacts, bodies and feelings in the nexus of intimacy and globalization.

To sum up, the overall aim of this book is to explore tango tourism as a lived reality which makes the dancers—locals and foreigners, market actors and clients—visible as significant players within a larger global scene. This focus emphasizes the highly political nature of both tango dancing and tourism. In order to capture these processes, we need perspectives sensitive to the production of gender, race and class and to the structure and function of an intimate dance economy. The complexity of the object of study calls for an engagement with various empirical and theoretical frameworks. In the following subsections, the study will be situated within several academic research areas, starting with the fields of intimacy and globalization studies, and followed by a conceptualization of tourism. Thereafter we will move on to theorize tango tourism as a conflict between different economic logics and we will close this section by discussing the negotiations of spaces and places in tango tourism.

Intimate Relations in Late-Modern Societies

One assumption underlying this book is that the search for intimacy has taken new directions and forms in late-modern societies. Recent shifts in western family life show that the number of people living in traditional nuclear families is decreasing, that relationships are more unstable and fluid and that both women and men seek out casual sexual relations, free from long-term commitments. Studies also show that people's intimate lives are reflected in new constructions of self in which autonomy and reflexivity are at center stage (Bauman 2003; Bawin-Legros 2004; Beck 2000; Giddens 1991, 1992; Illouz 2007; Jamieson 1998; Lewis 2001; Roseneil and Budgeon 2004; Roseneil 2007). In contrast to the majority of intimacy studies, this book suggests an opening up of the research area to include not only non-heteronormative ways of practicing sex and kinship, but also relations defined outside of the traditional realm of family life and sexuality. I will argue that Argentine tango dancing is an intriguing phenomenon that enables us to rethink intimacy and the ways in which we organize and make sense of personal life together with others.

As a consequence of the postponement of marriage, higher living standards and greater interest in self-development and -expression, leisure-time activities, such as tango dancing, make up an increasingly important social dimension in many western societies. Far from being a once-weekly hobby, tango takes up large amounts of the practitioners' free time and encompasses an entire social and emotional universe for many. Dancing communities throughout the western world consist of dedicated practitioners who visit dance clubs, take classes and participate in all kinds of tango-related events several nights a week. In general these people are not part of professional dance groups, but rather enjoy the social dancing, through which people meet and share a passionate interest. This is a milieu where friends and strangers share heartbeats and experience the emotional longing captured in melodies of sentimental tango songs. Moreover, the tango is a subculture that s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Advances in Feminist Studies and Intersectionality
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Argentine Tango Dancing
• PART III Negotiating Tango Tourism
• PART IV Conclusion
• Appendix: Notes from a Dancing Researcher
• Notes
• References
• Index