This detailed musicological study adds to contemporary tango scholarship by considering the adaptations made of its classic forms and traditions in lesbian-feminist cultural spaces. Queer tango, which has been around since the early 20th century, is the performing of the dance without regarding the traditionally male and female roles as leader and follower. This allows same-gender couples to occupy either role. Queer tango performance was revived in Germany in 2001, inspiring similar public performance spaces in other countries. Liska (communication sciences, Univ. of Buenos Aires, Argentina) begins by discussing the revitalization of tango in Argentina since the 1990s and then moves on to examine the interaction of different generations of dancers, changes in the paradigms of gender identities and the human body as culturally defined, homosexuality, and electronic music and its applications to the tango. The text is well written. Summing Up: Recommended.
Upper-division undergraduates; graduate students, professionals.