"Tango, a signifier of darkness and illegitimacy, of desire and counter-culture, is more than a dance. As Horacio Ferrer writes, "before being an artistic expression, before tango came to light as such […] tango was a certain attitude, a way of life adopted by those of diverse cultures" (1995: 11). In its popular representations, Argentine tango is described as a dance that evokes illicit sexual desire through an acrobatics that often looks choreographed. But "Argentine" tango is much more than this mythic evocation of a movement of desire. Tango is everything from a dance of solitudes to a nomadic movement of cultural displacement to a fierce locator of national identity. It is a dance of encounter and disencounter, a voyeuristic embrace of repressed sensuality and a complex network of (mis)understood directions."

(Negotiating Influence: Argentine Tango and a Politics of Touch)