The passion of music and dance: Body, gender, and sexuality

Description

The late nineteenth century witnessed the birth and popularization of a number of highly emotional musical styles that played on the eagerness of modern Europeans and Americans to toy with the limits of sanity and to taste the ecstasies of living on the edge. This absorbing book explores these popular, passionate musical styles — which include flamenco, tango and rebetika — and points out that they arose as well-intentioned intellectuals co-opted the emotional experiences most closely associated with women. In drawing those experiences out of female practice, they defined, objectified, and turned them into strategies of domination, the deepest impact of which was felt, ironically, by modern women. In bridging anthropology, sociology, cultural, media, body and gender studies, this book broadens the base of theory which has ignored the transnational world of Latin and Mediterranean popular culture and makes a powerful statement about the intersection of nationalism, sexuality, identity and authenticity. Edited by William Washabaugh, Professor of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Cover Title Page Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors 1 Introduction: Music, Dance, and the Politics of Passion (William Washabaugh) 2 Flamenco Song: Clean and Dirty (William Washabaugh) 3 Fashioning Masculinity in Flamenco Dance (William Washabaugh) 4 Gendering the Authentic in Spanish Flamenco (Timothy deWaal Malefyt) 5 Carlos Gardel and the Argentine Tango: The Lyric of Social Irresponsibility and Male Inadequacy (Donald Castro) 6 Tango and the Scandal of Homosocial Desire (Jeffrey Tobin) 7 From Wallflowers to Femmes Fatales: Tango and the Performance of Passionate Femininity (Marta E. Savigliano) 8 Rebetika: The Double-descended Deep Songs of Greece (Gail Holst-Warhaft) 9 The Tsifte-teli Sermon: Identity, Theology, and Gender in Rebetika (Angela Shand) 10 Passionless Dancing and Passionate Reform: Respectability, Modernism, and the Social Dancing of Irene and Vernon Castle (Susan C. Cook) 11 Social Theory and the Comparative History of Flamenco, Tango, and Rebetika (Gerhard Steingress) References Index