Queer/Tango/Theory: Gendered Semiosis, Dancing the Binary, and Dancing on Out

Abstract

Valencia, 2019, a queer tango festival: I had a first dance with [—], a transman I did not know. While I began with a typical “lead or follow” gesture, he offered only a leading position, and, intuiting that he wished to wholly occupy a “traditional” leading role, coded masculine, I stepped wholly into an extremely “feminine” mode of following: qualities I did not articulate at the time but might now gloss as extreme permeability and a kind of steady softness, an extreme availability and willingness I rarely, if ever, deploy while dancing with cis, straight men. Feeling increasingly sure of my intuition, noting the assertion in his lead, I melted a little further into his arms, softening the muscle tone in my chest, letting each lead reverberate through my body. Though we did not speak of it then, he later confirmed that our dynamic had given him something desired but not always offered.