Tango, Gendered Embodiment, and Acousmatic Listening in Argentina

Abstract

This essay considers the modernist cultural production of tango within the contexts of broadcast radio and popular print in the 1920s and 1930s, when both tango and radio were reaching their heyday. Because of its deep engagement with the changing social, economic, and media dynamics of Argentine modernity, its emphasis on cultural “newness” and experimental forms, as well as its play with matters of identity, embodiment, and belonging, tango deserves to be considered among the forms of Argentine modernism. I explore the connections between tango-canción (tango song) as broadcast on the radio, cultural conceptions of voice, and the new and changing understandings of gender identity, embodiment, and women’s roles as they emerge in popular magazines of the time. When we consider the modernism of tango or the shifting notions of embodiment, intimacy, and relation that accompany broadcast radio in the early twentieth century, we must recognize popular print as central to those developments and part of an intermedial nexus of responses to the situation of Argentine modernity. By examining the changing roles of tango’s cancionistas (female singers) in the twenties and thirties in the context of writing about women in the popular press, I show how the protocols and practices of radio and popular print offered crucial challenges to existing notions of gender in the mediascape of 1920s and 1930s Argentina.