You Wanted Malambo?: Choreographies and Subversions of Gender in Recent Cases of the Malambo Dance

Abstract

The Argentine folk dance malambo was historically consolidated during the 20th century as an exclusively masculine dance, but today both this dance and other folkloric manifestations are re-signified and updated through different artistic proposals. This paper presents three cases of contemporary dance works and an audiovisual that question canonized representations of gender in malambo and Argentine folk dances in general: Adentro! by Diana Szeinblum (2016), La era del cuero by Pablo Rotemberg (2022), Ingaucho (2020–2023) by Mauro Dann, and the music video for “¿Querían malambo?” by Nickytuns/Issi Records (2022). The paper also connects Susan Leigh Foster’s “Choreographies of Gender” (1998) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990, 1999) with the notion of reenactment proposed by Franko and Vallejos (2021) within dance studies. The theoretical categories of intersectional feminisms, especially from the perspective of queer/cuir studies, allow us to analyze the functioning of dissidence, disobedience, parody, or reaffirmation of gender in the mentioned works. They also allow us to observe how historically constructed conventions exert symbolic violence and how the stage becomes a space of contestation in the construction (and deconstruction) of meanings about the national.