ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses specific characteristics of tango's scandal/fascination dynamics, including references to the local strategies of disciplining and promoting the tango. It discusses the emergence of lay and scholarly interests in producing a history of tango that establishes national roots and authentic features—interests arising out of the restless and contradictory quest for national identity in in/dependent settings. The scandalous colonial, racial, and classisi histories of tango had been pacified under the exaggeration of its erotic display. The Western bourgeois colonizer's fascination with tango affected the internal struggles for national representation among the colonized. The promotion of tango through imperial exoticism and through "civilized" appropriations generated a diversity of tango practices that the need to establish an "authentic" tango became a must. The scandalized responses to the tango were morally concerned with sex, race, and class. In order to overcome the scandalous tango connotations, Argentinean "society" women needed to have their own propriety reconfirmed by the cultured colonizer.
