ABSTRACT
Tango often evokes fatal men and women caught in a somewhat dangerous dance, where obscure desires (forbidden liaisons, provocation, transgression, betrayal, revenge, jealousy) become spectacularly stylised. Depictions of tangos in narrative cinema, tango choreographies conceived for the stage, tango portrayals and tango metaphors in advertisement and literary fiction, and to some extent tango lyrics have contributed to this by now worldwide well-established cliché. As an ethnographer of the milongas (tango clubs) and as an aspiring milonguera (tango dancer) I became increasingly puzzled with the presence of wallflowers and the absence of femmes fatales in the everynight tango scene of Buenos Aires.1 This paper, then, situates wallflowers and more precisely the act of wallflowering at the centre rather then at the outskirts of the milongas. (Readers should be aware of the manoeuvring I am exerting here by setting the wallflower into motion, that is into wallflowering. The story starts with the limits of translation. In the milongas women wallflower [planchar is the slang Argentino-Spanish for this activity]. There is no corresponding noun to this verb applicable to the milonga setting. [Planchadora, as the one who plancha, would immediately bring to mind someone who presses or irons clothes for a living. It is a profession of sorts, with no relation to the dancing/non-dancing economy that I am addressing here. Planchar – and this is a wild guess – has been assigned to this active ‘waiting to be asked to dance’ perhaps as an association with the unintended ‘ironing’ of the garment on which the aspiring dancer sits for extended time.] Therefore, while wallflower [in English] ascribes a rather set identity to those who don’t dance – meaning they probably never will because of who they are – planchar designates a [lack of] activity – not dancing – into which some aspiring dancers happen to have fallen under certain circumstances. La que plancha [the one who wallflowers] is not as stuck in the character as ‘the wallflower’: One wallflowers; the other is a wallflower. This picture does not include those who, whether inside or outside of the dance club or dancing situation, choose systematically or circumstantially not to dance. The lack of desire to dance immediately situates them outside of the rules of the game [the economy]. I am
proposing the idea that a full tango experience is impossible without the presence of wallflowers and without the threat of wallflowering as the potential dancers enter the tango club. And I wish to clarify that wallflowering is a traumatic, intense, trying, unpleasant state to go through. Since all women in the milonga scene wallflower to a certain extent, wallflowering is both despised and admired for reasons I will soon explicate. Given that milongueras often wallflower more than they get to dance at
tango clubs, and that they (we) endure rather than enjoy this rather humiliating position, I have wondered why and how women wallflower and what is at stake in this act of passivity. Why do women attend the milongas night after night, persistently undergoing this enhanced state of anxiety that compromises their self-esteem? Unwilling to settle for a facile explanation in terms of heterosexual sado-masochistic dynamics (as in: ‘Women enjoy submission; they like to suffer’), I will entertain the idea that milongueras are irredeemable gamblers of their own femininity.2
