Tango Hierarchies and Our Stress Responses to Them
/In the previous entry, we scratched the surface of how ecological factors create inequity along race, class, gender, and beyond in people’s experiences of the world--and how those differences manifest in people’s sense of safety and belonging in tango. This extends to who is typically most supported or hindered in being able to materially and socially maintain a regular tango practice--in other words, who gets to practice with ease, and who feels welcomed and celebrated in your tango spaces?
Despite its origins as a popular street dance amongst immigrants, slaves, and manual laborers in Argentina, tango communities--and social dance communities at large--in the U.S. have only realistically been accessible to those with disposable time and income. At the very least you’ll need money/time to exchange for group lessons or practicas, and availability to actually attend outside of work/family/life responsibilities. Things like location, dates and times of events, shoes, and dress code can all be physical and social accessibility hurdles to maintaining a tango practice. People who do make it to class may still conclude that it’s too much to mentally/emotionally maintain--even without exclusionary cultural norms such as only dancing with people you know, avoiding dances with beginners or older dancers or dancers of color, enforcing gender binaries in leader/follower roles, or only dancing with those you find attractive or are pursuing romantically/sexually. While some norms are born of necessity--such as only choosing to dance with people that make you feel safe in the face of predatory behaviors on the dance floor--many other practices either reinforce or are borne out of hierarchies, spoken and unspoken.
And these hierarchies are often constructed along the same lines of demographic inequities created by the ecological factors we discussed earlier. Navigating these hierarchies can cause a number of stress responses in attendees. And conversely, observing the stress responses in your members can be an eye-opening indicator of what types of hierarchies exist in the norms of your tango community.
In this entry, we’ll be looking at symptoms of those hierarchies through the lens of ethology. Ethology is the study of animal behavior and social organization from a biological lens--essentially, how do patterns of socializing affect what goes on in your body, and how does it affect how you act in different environments? When we look specifically at stress responses from this ethological viewpoint, we first look to understand what triggers those stress responses. The main three triggers are environment, predation, and conspecifics. An environmental stressor could look like not having adequate shelter, or dealing with extreme weather. Predation stressors come from proximity to predators. And conspecifics refer to members in your own species/pack. The majority of stressors that we experience as humans in the tango community come from potential harm that could come to us via conspecifics--our community members.
For instance, let’s look at a situation in which someone stops a few times per song to give unsolicited advice without consent on what their partner’s technique should be (outside of making requests to stop something harmful). Their partner could react in many different ways: if the partner was not bothered by this, then maybe they would do nothing and continue with the dance. They might flee and leave in the middle of the dance. They might retaliate and tell off their partner. They may confidently tell them that they aren’t looking for feedback tonight, just dancing. They may become super apologetic, or overly friendly. They might grin and bear it until the tanda is over and then go vent to their friends off the dance floor. Or they might really appreciate all this feedback despite the frequent interruption of their dancing and not experience this as invasive at all. Their reaction to this situation heavily depends on how this makes them feel, and how safe or unsafe they perceive themselves to be in this situation--a process called neuroception, the cognitive process for distinguishing between safety and danger.
Now, while this isn’t always predatory behavior, this could feel like a violation of boundaries and an inappropriate interruption of their experience of the evening. I personally have reacted to this in a multitude of ways over time. At the very beginning of my experience, I thought it was part and parcel to dancing tango, so I allowed it to happen even though it was uncomfortable and discouraging at times--highlighting how more experienced people took advantage of my own lack of experience in tango culture. As I learned, I still felt afraid to interrupt someone and ask them to refrain from doing that for fear of being shunned from dances in the future--especially if they were male leads, teachers, or people who were much more experienced than I was. Whether these people were intentionally leveraging this or not--this highlights power dynamics around gender (male vs. female), social status in the community (teacher vs. student), and experience again (new vs. veteran). As I got more experienced, I was able to discern when people were using this as an elaborate flirting strategy--especially if they had never seen me before and thought I was too inexperienced to know that this wasn’t part of polite, respectful tango culture. In these cases, sometimes I’d feel more comfortable just leaving the dance, and other times I feared triggering any perceptions of romantic rejection (and subsequent retaliation) so I’d wait for the tanda (and lecturing) to end and then just avoid them for the rest of the night, often in a heightened state of vigilance. Plus, I didn’t know who to notify of this behavior or if that would even help, as opposed to inviting apathy from an organizer--or even sympathy for the transgressor. This dips back into gender and experience level hierarchies again--and racial hierarchies in some of my experiences. In each of these reactions, there are social norms and hierarchies at play (both in and out of the tango space) that enable the person crossing these boundaries to feel relatively comfortable doing so. These same hierarchies also made me feel uncomfortable--or even at risk of increased harm--in reasserting those boundaries.
Below is a chart of the different types of stress responses that can be observed according to this ethological model, with examples of each in the wild and in tango. In addition to the listed example responses below, see if you can recognize these responses in the examples from the previous two paragraphs.
Again, these models are never perfect or absolute--hundreds of models exist around conceptualizing stress, each with their strengths and shortcomings. And one of the major shortcomings of this model is that the nature of animals out in the wild cannot simply be taken as a 1:1 behavior predictor for humans in our varied societies. Furthermore, these example situations are not at all exhaustive of what happens in tango spaces and communities.
It’s important to note here that people have similar or even identical responses to perceptions of threat, regardless of presence of threat--but the physiological effects are just as real. In fact, leveraging the ambiguous nature of perceiving social threats is a tool commonly used in exercising power and privilege over a person/people. In the example at the beginning of the article, being unsure whether asking this person to stop would result in retaliation or not--and expending the mental resources to weigh those probabilities--is taxing on the system, on top of juggling all the other social involvement of navigating a tango space. How many people adopt survival/coping patterns of avoiding or simply enduring these ambiguous possibilities of threat in the first place?
Also, people act in so many other ways that are not stress responses. Sometimes people are just irritable or sad or distracted or any number of things--not everything is a stress response. In this entry, I’m largely talking about stress responses in the context of someone definitively crossing another’s boundaries (intentional or not) and/or enacting harm on someone else--neither of which should ever be dismissed or excused.
What can we do about behaviors that uphold or result from hierarchies? We can start by asking questions: do people exhibiting these behaviors also expect to experience it themselves from other dancers? Would they still be doing this behavior if their race/gender/ability/age was the same/different from their partner, or the community at large? What role do any possible differences in experience level play? What is it about the cultural norms of the space that makes someone comfortable displaying behaviors that cross others’ boundaries? These are potent questions to consider when addressing problematic patterns in your communities.
As a gold-star bonus, I invite you to review the previous article with this new lens and reflect on how the ethological mechanisms here interact with the ecological mechanisms there. Then, reflect on which of the above responses you’ve seen (or experienced) in your tango community. What power dynamics were at play in each interaction? And what types of hierarchies does that power dynamic reveal? How are those power dynamics reinforced by existing ecological factors?
I know the last few entries seem like the worst parts of the tango experience--but it certainly isn’t all bad or I’m sure we wouldn’t still be here. Tango can also enable restorative, nourishing connections, and can act as a space for healthy social support that offers partial buffering against the effects of systems of oppression (and I’ll be talking about that in coming entries!). But left unchecked, these hierarchies often have the opposite effect if people leverage these power inequities to exclude or disenfranchise people. Being aware of them can be a powerful tool for addressing common experiences of discomfort or harm in your communities.
One of many places to continue learning:
Read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Read “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome” by Ruchika Tulshyan Jodi-Ann Burey
Read the follow-up article “End Imposter Syndrome in Your Workplace” by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey
Things you can do today:
Donate to the Loveland Foundation - “The Loveland Foundation was established in 2018 by Rachel Cargle in response to her widely successful birthday wish fundraiser, Therapy for Black Women and Girls. Her enthusiastic social media community raised over $250,000, which made it possible for Black women and girls nationally to receive therapy support. The Loveland Foundation is the official continuation of this effort to bring opportunity and healing to communities of color, and especially to Black women and girls.”
Subscribe to Anti-Racism Daily for daily, bite-sized bits of education and related actions you can take. Commit to taking a few of the suggested actions per week - start out with even just one if you want to ease into it
How you can practice anti-racism with Oxygen:
Learn about white supremacy culture and consider how it manifests in tango spaces. Read Oxygen's new Values doc, which will continually evolve as we learn more about how to disrupt supremacy culture in our community. What would you add to it?
Do NOT:
Betray your humanity by choosing to still remain a bystander on divesting from white supremacy
Consider yourself “woke” or “an expert” after reading this--or any--singular article. I myself am still learning these concepts and how to apply them personally and in community
Take my opinion as a monolithic representation of how people with my shared identities feel about this
Start apologizing to your POC/queer friends for how terrible white supremacy is in general (if you have something specific and personal that you did and want to apologize for, get their consent first, and remember that you aren’t entitled to any specific outcome)
Sources
Cantor, C. (2009). Post-traumatic stress disorder: evolutionary perspectives. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, 43, 1038-1048.
Denniston, C. (2015). The meaning of tango: the story of the Argentinian dance. Portico.
Oxygen Tango Staff. “History of Tango 1.” The Tango Challenge. Oxygen Tango School. Los Angeles, CA. March 5, 2018.
