ABSTRACT
That Pablo functions as the primary object of Sally's gaze (not to mention the gaze of a host of diegetic spectators as well as viewers taking in Potter's film) is indeed important in that it allows for a neat reversal of conventional looking relations. Yet Potter is not simply interested in re-gendering the gaze so as to turn the male gaze on its head while maintaining a scopic economy that disempowers through objectification; rather, what makes The Tango Lesson so politically productive is the manner in which it constructs Pablo as spectacle. It is important to acknowledge that Pablo's specularization is not unprecedented since, as both Steve Neale and Steven Cohan contend in their contributions to the anthology Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, the one type of male body that is routinely put on display is that of the dancer or musical performer.9 Yet those performers (and their directors) have gone to great lengths, through a variety of means, to diffuse the threat of feminization associated with such displays. Cohan argues that, in the case of Fred Astaire, for example, narrativestopping dance numbers function as highly theatricalized performances of masculinity insofar as Astaire's star persona overshadows the diegetic and narrative context of his movement. Certainly a similar argument could be made with regard to Pablo, since the extent to which his character is a fiction or a fact is intentionally made ambiguous. More important, however, Pablo is not mere spectacle; he transcends the iconic status of the fetishized female star theorized by Mulvey in that his specularization is thoroughly implicated in his embodiment and, thus, his subjectivity. While
SalJy's labour is wedded to her artistic vision, Pablo identifies himself first and foremost as a dancer whose understanding of himself is derived largely, if not entirely, from the experience of his own corporeality in conjunction with the attention of an admiring audience.
