[Tango-L] Gender Roles

[TangoDC.com]

Dear Sean,

Thank you for breaking the rainbowed film of this bubble and getting 
into some real analysis. (Thanks also for hearing the irony in my posts. 
It's there for a reason.)

Your description of tango as a sublimation of mating seems, for the most 
part, to ring true to my ears. I hesitate to agree fully only because I 
think that's not necessarily an aesthetic axiom inherent to the medium 
itself. The male-female pairing is a convention, and a dominant one, but 
it is still a convention. (One I adhere to 99% of the time, by the way. 
Still, I'm aware of what I'm doing.)

Also, not every male-female pair needs to sublimate the mating complex. 
That, to me, is to put our gender roles in a very small box. It 
overdetermines the meaning of the tango, and obliterates much of the 
particular, individual artistry that many talented people are trying to 
create. Other relationships are possible, and can be sublimated, or 
dramatized, by the dance. In daily close-embrace dancing, for instance 
(which perhaps doesn't rise to the level of art; but no matter), there 
can be a subtle drama of care-taking involved-- almost a parent-child 
relationship-- especially when the dancers are at different levels of 
expertise. One human gives comfort to another. This doesn't make gender 
irrelevant, but it certainly makes the procreative function of gender 
quite superfluous. From this perspective, calling everything a 
sublimation of mating seems like a whitewash of our more delicate, 
vulnerable, and chaste moments on earth.

There is also a larger socio-historical context into which we are 
plunged, which the mating theme fails to accommodate. I mean the 
relationship every couple has to tradition. Every skilled dance partakes 
of it, albeit some less reverently than others. And the innovative dance 
"rewrites" tradition, in a way, or reorganizes it, so that history 
appears to lead forwards along a new path that culminates in the 
innovation, which itself recedes into tradition as time moves on. That 
is, from here, in the present, we reconnect the dots we call "history" 
or "tradition" when someone creates a New dot. This is what both T.S. 
Eliot and Harold Bloom-- critics who agree on virtually nothing else-- 
said poetic genius does, and it applies to every artistic medium in 
which there is an identifiable tradition. (If you've got a lot of time 
on your hands, see "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by Eliot, and 
"The Anxiety of Influence" by Bloom.)

So, to say that every "dot" in tango represents a sublimation of 
heterosexual mating-- that concedes, in my opinion, a little too much to 
convention. And to what I call "tango propaganda." I see a spectrum of 
personality in the dance far wider than that.

To approach this from the other end of the telescope... I also think 
we're being a little reductive, and not giving the dance enough credit, 
if we see a man and a woman and conclude that, in the allegory of 
sublimation, they're playing themselves. There's a dark eroticism in 
bullfighting, in which (to pursue just one line of thought) the 
masculine bull represents the fluid, overpowering force of 
(stereotypically female) Nature. Performance media, such as tango or 
bullfighting or drama, transform the performers. Men and women become 
something other, they open a crack in the teacup of everyday existence, 
and we half-see a lane to the land of the dead. (To corrupt a few lines 
of Auden.)

Let me restate this last point, in case I've been unclear. Your argument 
that tango sublimates the mating ritual sounds to me like an argument 
that bullfighting sublimates the raising of livestock.

As I've said already, I think that such arguments reason backwards from 
their conclusion. (That's the problem with a priori arguments. But if 
you'll play Kant, I'll play Nietzsche.) The "premise" (or axiom) that 
the tango sublimates the mating ritual is actually a conclusion, whose 
premise is that a man and a woman have procreative roles. I'm trying to 
reason from the ground-up, existentially rather than essentially (to 
borrow from philosophy again), starting with the observation that men 
and women have multiple roles in life, some of them biologically 
mundane, some of them socially or culturally or individually mundane.

As for the ironic stuff... Well, these instances of transport, of 
visionary performance, are rather rare. Sometimes a leg is just a leg-- 
and I prefer not to scorn these mundanities, since they're the bulk of 
tango reality. Not everything must be, or even can be, engorged with 
sublime Meaning. Humans who look at the glory of the heavens and wonder 
"Who made that?" have never advanced anyone's knowledge, despite the 
great depth of spiritual feeling they enjoy. Only the finicky fellow who 
asks the smaller questions-- "Why do those clouds get darker before it 
rains?"-- figures out something about optics, altitude, and weather 
patterns.

In the literary field, we distinguish between poetry and verse, which is 
nothing more than a distinction of quality. It's the same as calling one 
thing Genius and another thing Talent. But there are aesthetic 
components that are common to both-- e.g., in tango terms, to a sublime 
performance, to a "tango moment," and to a teacher dancing with a 
beginner-- and I think if we can pinpoint what they are, we'll get 
beyond the postcard descriptions of the tango, which are a little too 
steeped in sex and the brothel-story for my tastes. I think there's 
much, much more going on.

These are my preliminary thoughts, at least. I disagree with your a 
priori premises, and thus with some of your conclusions; and I also find 
it important to consider the bathwater as well as the baby.

Anyone else want to chime in?

Jake Spatz
Washington, DC


Trini y Sean (PATangoS) wrote:
> Gender Roles
>
> I agree with Sergio's assertion that separate male 
> and female roles are essential to the Argentine 
> tango. For the record, I am not reversing my prior 
> position that I prefer to dance with women who lead. 
> If people find these two conditions contradictory, 
> maybe I will try to resolve that later. For now, I 
> will try to briefly defend the argument that these 
> two roles are necessarily distinct.
>
> First, some a priori assumptions:
>
> 1. Argentine tango is an art, not a craft. 
> (This distinction has been made before on 
> the list. Use the archive.)
> 2. The essence of art is the elevation of 
> the mundane to the sublime. 
> 3. Argentine tango is the sublimation of the 
> mundane biological act of mating into the art 
> of dance. If anyone is outraged by this assumption,
> go look up "sublimation" before you flame.
>
> Conclusions in reverse order:
>
> 3. There are very few rules about the relationship
> between art and the mundane. But one is that the 
> object of sublimation must be recognizable in the 
> interpreted representation. There is a biological 
> necessity for male and female roles in the act of 
> mating. Any representation of mating, however 
> sublime, must preserve those roles to have any 
> meaning. This does not mean that the roles must be 
> played by the respective genders, only that they 
> must be played.
>
> 2. When Jake de DC described tango as the exact 
> opposite of sublimation: the precipitation of 
> voyeurism from art, I interpreted it as a clever 
> inside joke for those who "get it". Did I give you 
> too much credit Jake? I am referring to your idea of 
> displaying the woman's legs. If you were serious, 
> then you don't yet "get it".
>
> 1. You must be an artist to dance the Argentine 
> tango. I believe that artistry is a basic element of 
> human nature. It is often suppressed by unnatural 
> forces, such as the drive for economic productivity 
> (there are no artists in the oil industry). If an 
> individual's drive for artistry is completely 
> repressed, perhaps he may no longer be considered 
> human. Interpreted this way, I accept Lucia's Faustian
> argument. I believe that the rising 
> popularity of Argentine tango is due to its ability 
> to release long suppressed artistic urges. Through 
> the pursuit of tango, economic resources revert into 
> human beings. Thus the feeling among many tangueros: 
> that they were not truly alive until (except when) 
> they danced tango. Other forms of dance, which may be 
> practiced as a craft, do not necessarily have this 
> capacity for the re-humanization of their 
> practitioners. Although, if practised as an art, the
> type of dance is not relevant. Thus some (not me) may
> find their humanity through ballroom or other dances.
>
> Sean
>
> PATangoS - Pittsburgh Argentine Tango Society 
> Our Mission: To make Argentine Tango Pittsburgh's most popular social dance. 
> http://www.pitt.edu/~mcph/PATangoWeb.htm
>
>
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