PDF En Español: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/cpa/n25/26531.pdf
Destination Buenos Aires
Tango – Cinematographic Sexual Tourism
Abstract
Buenos Aires currently enjoys a boom in international tourism and the tango is undoubtedly a main local attraction. What are foreign tourists looking for in the tango experience? How do they know what is in a tango and in the tango world for them? What pleasures does the tango offer them? Unconvinced with settling explanations based in the universal and transcendental powers of art, the author explores the uses of tango in narrative cinema – in particular, the sophisticated ways in which the erotics of cultural difference frame tango-esque seduction. For this purpose, tango films of recent release (Potter’s The Tango Lesson and Saura’s Tango) and oldies (Gilda) are analyzed as stories that, taking place in an exotic Buenos Aires, weave intertwined dramatic plots of cultural and gender alterity – exacerbated by the presence of femmes fatales – , through dramatic and dangerous romantic disencounters with a happy end. Thus the tango, culturally appropriated, promises violent emotional turmoils, erotically tamed via “ universal” laws of heterosexuality and homosociality. An irresistible cinematic formula for sex tourism.
Key Words: Tango in Film, Sexuality and Cultural Tourism, Cinema and Inter/Multi/Transculturalism, Femmes Fatales.
Resumo
Buenos Aires disfruta de un boom turístico internacional y el tango
figura predominantemente entre los motivos de atracción.
¿Qué buscan los viajeros foráneos en la experiencia tanguera?
¿Cómo saben qué les puede brindar específicamente un tango y el
mundo del tango en general? ¿Qué placeres les ofrece el tango?
No conforme con explicaciones sobre el carácter trascendental y
universal del arte, este artículo explora los recursos sofisticados
empleados en la narrativa cinematográfica para transmitir la
seducción tanguera en el marco del erotismo de la diferencia
cultural. Con este fin se analizan películas de tango recientes
(The Tango Lesson de Potter y Tango de Saura) y del
pasado (Gilda) en las que, en la exótica locación de Buenos Aires,
la alteridad cultural se cruza con la alteridad de género
(exacerbada por la presencia de femmes fatales) para desarrollar
dramáticos y peligrosos desencuentros amorosos con final feliz.
El tango, entonces, así apropiado, promete violentos huracanes
emocionales, eróticamente docilizados por las leyes “universales”
de la heterosexualidad y la homosocialidad. Una fórmula
cinemática irresistible para el turismo sexual cultural.
Palavras-chave: Tango en el Cine, Turismo Cultural y Sexualidad, Inter/Multi/Tr
MARTA SAVIGLIANO
Professor
Ph.D. in English, UC Berkeley
marta.savigliano@ucr.edu
Office: ARTS 107
Marta Elena Savigliano holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and a Licenciatura in Anthropology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
She is an Argentine political theorist and anthropologist interested in the politics of culture: the transnational traffic of cultural goods, workers, ideologies and affects under global capitalism.
She is the author of Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Westview, 1995), translated into Turkish, Slovene and Japanese, which received the Congress of Research on Dance Award for Outstanding Book 1993-1996. Her second book Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North South Translation (Wesleyan U.P., 2003) addresses feminization and fatal-ness as recurrent tropes associated to artistic and scholarly representations of Latin America and, in particular, of Argentina.
Angora Matta was first conceived as a libretto for a thriller-opera of tangos. As an interdisciplinary and multi-art project of international collaboration, Angora Matta was developed with composer Ramon Pelinski, choreographer Susan Rose, and animation director Miguel Angel Nanni. A first experimental presentation of the complete work took place in the Teatro Presidente Alvear of Buenos Aires in November 2002 as a US-Argentine co-production involving 30 artists on stage.
The active participation of artists and intellectuals in reproducing or challenging historical and contemporary colonial world orders is consistently discussed in her work. Savigliano's current research focuses on staged and screened Global South responses to World Dance, in particular self-parodic versions of “traditional” dance forms associated to racialized, exotic, and erotic representations of “other” cultures and their contentious power in globalization.
Savigliano taught at UC Riverside's Dance department from 1992 to 1998, and at UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures from 1998 to 2006. She is currently Full Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in Dance History and Theory; and founder of GLOSAS, an international center for Global South Advanced Studies located in Buenos Aires. Savigliano is President of the Congress on Research in Dance since August 2010.
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