Abstract Book of the 3rd Global Conference on Gender Studies
Year: 2025
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Crashing (and Cripping) Tango: Disabled Sexuality in the Performance of Dance
Carlotta Ione Harold
ABSTRACT:
This paper offers a crip analysis of the 2018 documentary, Crashing Tango, produced by Nico Muñoz, which tells the story of Gabriela Torres, the first wheelchair-user to compete in the World Tango Championship in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Disability scholar Victoria Ann Lewis defines “crip” as a modifier that identifies “a sensibility, identity, or activity in opposition to mainstream assumptions about disability.” In the film, Gabriela and her partner, Pablo Pererya (a nondisabled man), actively crip sexuality, pleasure, and intimacy through their tango, unsettling the strict rules of the dance and creating space for nontraditional gender roles, expanded ideas of pleasure, and liberatory love and partnership. Given tango’s important role as a reflection and creater of national culture in Argentina, Torres and Pererya’s crip tango facilitates a potential expansion of Argentine identity. Using the theoretical frameworks of disability and sexuality scholars like Tobin Siebers, as well as a thorough analysis of the short film, I assert that Torres’ crip tango has larger implications on traditional ideologies of love, sex, and gender.
Keywords: crip tango, pleasure, national identity, non-traditional gender, ideologies of ability