HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STUDIES PROGRAM
WOMEN’S STUDIES PROGRM
Present
Queer/Tango/Theory:
Gendered Semiosis, Dancing the Binary, and Dancing on Out.
An informal talk by Luna Beller-Tadiar
Tuesday October 22nd
1:00-2:25 In Berliner 117 (in English)
2:40-4:05 Breslin 202 (in Spanish)
Luna Beller-Tadiar (she/they) is a multi -media artist, and a doctoral student interested in kinesthetic cultures, semiotic processes, and queer and decolonial communal practices. She has recently done work on queer Argentine tango semiosis and on the circulation of gesture on TikTok and is also interested in Filipino postcolonial bodily mimetic labor. Luna makes and performs choreographic work, draws comics, and (sometimes) translates. She holds a BA in Literature from Yale University (2018) and is currently pursuing a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt.
Luna's work combines their practice as a dancer and their interest in thinking through movement. They will be talking to and with students about their more recent work, based on their experience dancing tango in different international contexts. This work conceives tango as a body-to-body communicative practice that can be analyzed politically. They point to a normative (gendered, colonial) “binary” model of tango that trains relational gender roles, and claim that queer tango, at its best, intervenes in these formations not necessarily by “removing” gender but rather by reconfiguring and repurposing forms of gendered bodily address through a less more dialogic mode of communication. They interpret queer tango as a collaborative “gender laboratory” that opens possible ways of being and moving together.
