Books on tango could have their own shelf in the dance section of bookstores. In recent decades, the literature has expanded exponentially as tango has become a global market phenomenon, second only to yoga, in terms of body matters. Practitioners of both tango and yoga will sooner or later develop first an interest, then a certain urgency, to travel to the places where it all began—Argentina and India—in order to experience the real, the authentic thing.

Kathy Davis, an American sociologist and oral historian based in Amsterdam, has built her reputation as an investigator of globetrotting, transnational phenomena, often articulated as feminist dilemmas. In the 1990s, Davis explored in depth women's voluntary cosmetic surgery as a complicated set of negotiations of the subjective sense of self, as a possible source of empowerment, and as a legitimate solution for emotional suffering (Davis Reference Davis1995). Those were the years, as well, when surgical operations had entered the performance space, becoming “a site of public debate.”Footnote ¹

Perhaps her most highly praised work remains The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves—How Feminism Travels Across Borders (Reference Davis2007). It is a fascinating travelogue on feminist knowledge production, which follows the impacts, traces, and adaptations of the famous book on women's health, Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women's Health Group 1971) from its first appearance in the U.S. during the feminist rights movement, until recent days, and across the globe.

The migration of ideas embodied in women's practices has always been the major focus of Davis's research. Her latest book, Dancing Tango, Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World, shares the same perspective, the same puzzles, and rhetorical questions of her other projects: why and how do women do what they do? In this book she asks, among other things, can there be a feminist dancing tango? The latter question was posed to Davis—now a long time tanguera—in the 1990s, by one of her feminist colleagues after discovering Davis's involvement with tango. Davis herself had to confront the baggage of cultural stereotypes and expectations associated with the dance when she first accidentally walked into a tango salon in Amsterdam in the 1980s and thought that a young punk looking couple, blissfully dancing to the scratchy music of Argentinian tango from the 1930s, was paradoxical. Davis realized how tango remains an “incomprehensible subculture to the non-initiated” (3).

At times, questions raised at propitious moments prove to generate outstanding research. Without a non-sudamericano asking Marta Savigliano: “But, Marta, what is tango?,” we may not have had one of the most theoretically rigorous and passionately argued books on tango—Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Reference Savigliano1995)—even to these days. Davis's initial personal motive—to prove that feminists, in the name of passion, can frequent milongas without embarrassment—actively engages in a conversation with Savigliano, whose book she sees as a departure point for any critical study of tango. Being in the position of the cultural colonizer, in Savigliano's terms, Davis believes that a postcolonial reading of tango à la Savigliano may no longer be relevant for our time, since Argentineans are not seen as complicit with cultural outsiders in the practice of “exotization” or “othering.” Rather, Davis reads the encounters between Argentineans and outsiders as “mutually beneficial—and in some cases—conducive to new forms of community” (17). According to Davis, where Savigliano focuses “on the politics of passion, she leaves the experience of passion unexplored” (13). But where is passion located?

Although Davis is familiar with most of the classic and more recent literature of tango studies, she adopts as a model for her investigation the work of urban ethnographer Loïc Wacquant, who, in his 2004 study of boxers in Chicago, argued that by embodying the practice of the subjects under study, it is possible to write a sociology from the body vs. a sociology of the body.Footnote ² Wacquant's dream of a “sensual sociology yet to be invented” (Wacquant Reference Wacquant2004, 70), and Davis's approach are revelatory of how dance—and theories of corporalities—still navigate the “subculture” of the social sciences. Even in the most reputable academic circles, the lived experience of the body, crucial in the production of culture and in theoretically framing social processes, is still located in a Cartesian dichotomy of body and soul, experience vs. politics.

Davis conducted her extensive fieldwork dancing back and forth between milongas in Amsterdam (mostly populated by affluent cosmopolitan professionals) where she lives, and Buenos Aires, where tango devotees sooner or later go, and in some cases settle permanently. As yogis carry their yoga mat in their suitcase, tangueros and tangueras always pack their outfits and shoes, since they know that they will almost always find a milonga wherever they travel, from Athens to Tokyo.

Davis's microphone (when she is not bodily recording while dancing) is often turned on in order to question her informants; to capture their moods, enthusiasms, and preferences; or to take in their more articulated ideas of how difficult and pleasurable it is to dance, who their ideal dance partners would be, and why they are so obsessed with tango. Davis's acute attention is devoted to details in her chapter, “Salon Cultures,” where she discusses differences in the architecture and fixtures of milongas and participants’ outfits, not only between Amsterdam and Buenos Aires, but also between the center of Buenos Aires where tourists go to appreciate tango as spectators, and the spots frequented by locals on the outskirts of the city. Both Europeans arriving in Buenos Aires and Argentineans traveling to Europe must switch languages and adopt the norms and rules in the each other's salons. For instance, women in Amsterdam feel more comfortable initiating the dance, by inviting a partner, instead of waiting to be selected. After all, most tangueros and tangueras go to milongas to dance. The different codigos are more extensively articulated in the chapter, “Performing Femininity, Performing Masculinity,” where Davis concludes that

A whole chapter, “Queering Tango,” is dedicated to a more recent trend of gay milongas in Buenos Aires (such as the first gay salon, La Marshall, and Milonga Mujeres for women only, founded by dancer, writer, and professor of literature Mariana DoCampo) and queer festivals throughout the world. Davis argues that these developments challenge the heteronormative baggage that the dance comes with from the past, opening up a “dialogue based on equality between partners regardless of gender” (135).

The theme of tango as addiction recurs in the testimonies of the tango aficionados and aficionadas, interviewed by Davis. Their desire to master the steps (devoting more time to lessons, practicing privately) in order to enjoy the pleasure of dancing in the milongas, also has a darker and destructive side: the need to possess the perfect, most glamorous, and expensive outfit and shoes, and to travel more and more often to Buenos Aires, some leaving their previous lives behind just to be nearer their favorite milongas. Dancing Tango, in this regard, is a compelling multivocal memoir of anonymous tango addicts.Footnote ³ Carolyn Merritt, in Tango Nuevo, dedicates a whole chapter, ”?Droga o Terapia? (Drug or Therapy?),” to addiction. She identifies in the experience of tango a community—the non-utilitarian activity of searching for physical contact and immediacy. This, she argues, is a potential form of resistance to the consumerist attitude that has turned tango into an industry (Merritt Reference Merritt2012, 116).

Dancing Tango, while passionately written, loses force with Davis's insistence on a need for “a less ideological and more empirically grounded approach” (185), focusing on the experience of tango as “so pleasurably intense that it is simply irresistible” (191). This sounds more escapist than a potential feminist cause for resistance; politics can exist in the corporeal experience.