ABSTRACT
Romance is widely seen as an area of life in which we act spontaneously and outside of social norms. Nevertheless, intimate life provides numerous cases where gendered, heteronormative, racialized and class-based power regimes operate. In some cases judicial rules are at work, such as state regulations against marriage and childbearing between same-sex couples or between black and white people (Foucault 1990; Mills and Pateman 2008; Rydström 1996; Ware 1997). Although partner matching in western societies more often takes place without visible external coercion, people tend to ‘choose’ partners from similar racial, cultural and socio-economic backgrounds to themselves. In order to look closer into the invisible yet powerful webs that structure intimate life, this chapter explores narratives of romance among western women travelling to dance tango in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It shows both how individual women make sense of their own and others’ love life in the context of this dance travel and how at the macro level they thereby engage in the production of romantic scripts in a global geography of desire.
