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Ethnographic Rendez-vous
while avoiding the often understated competition for male partners.
In addition, my female tango pals taught me more than anyone else
did about how to deflect and manipulate the aggression and subtle
sexual insinuations of men. How? By reacting as a typical tanguera
would, through direct and abrasive verbal (and even physical) ges-
tures to convey a single and forceful message: “Leave me alone and
go bother someone else.”
Tango Capital: Overcoming Voyeurism
To dance tango and dance it well requires discipline, patience, prac-
tice, and more practice, and as in the professional-sport philosophy,
the more responsible the practitioner, the more respect he or she will
command.^5 As I witnessed the dancers, I often thought to myself:
“Watching them, you might think they are getting ready for a doc-
toral comprehensive examination, but they are not: they are just very
concentrated collapsing into each other’s arms, while sweating like
hell.... And still they look so engaged in what they are doing....
Are they enjoying it?” (Tango notes, April 25 , 2001 ). As this reflec-
tion suggests, tango amateurs, serious about their enterprise, will fall
prey to the tango métier. They will endure the cumbersomeness of re-
hearsing the same steps over and over again not only as a painstak-
ing effort to achieve perfection but also as a means to develop a gen-
uinetangoesque style that will make them stand out within the tango
crowd. For the sake of mastering the tango, the apprentice will de-
vote countless hours of unpaid work to rehearse steps that will be
carefully choreographed and syncopated with (and against) a part-
ner, and therefore subject to surprises, improvisations, unforgettable
mistakes, and bodily misunderstandings.
No matter how different tango techniques may be, one rule of thumb
prevails: the more milongueros join the dancing floor, the more expe-
rienced their bodies will become to the spontaneous reflexes of their
partners’ movements, and to the timing of other couples that religiously
follow the clockwise rotation of the tango etiquette. This embodied
social knowledge, which I refer to as tango capital (an indirect prod-
uct of social capital as is learned and shared with others), is only pos-
sible through the tango embrace to which want-to-be tangueros have
