ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that tango dancing bodies in the twenty-first century are a site of contemporary gender role performance in Istanbul with a focus on the woman and the follower role in relation to the man and the leader role. Here, twenty-first-century urban secular upper-middle and middle classes perform gendered roles in contrast to the Islamic bourgeois and lower-classes in Istanbul. The chapter displays how traditional male and female roles of the early twentieth-century Argentine lower classes are enmeshed with those of the twenty-first-century upper-middle and middle classes for the tangoing body in urban Istanbul highlighting how contemporary globalized Argentine tango dance combines the techniques of a rational system that shapes and disciplines the contemporary body with the traditional leading and following dance roles that derive from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century male and female roles. It provides answers to the questions of how are new dance techniques, twenty-first-century understanding of urban gender roles, and traditional gender roles are experienced simultaneously on the twenty-first-century dance floor in urban Istanbul? What do they transform into on the twenty-first-century dance floor as the couples interact and move?
