Queer Bodies, Machinic Perception and Dancing Beyond the Self

This chapter will explore what queer(ing) Tango practices brings to our understandings of friendship, social relations, bodily attunements, and the politics of dancing bodies. The chapter will explore the implications of listening-with-touch as a queer practice, which connects with forms of somatic attention, which have been relegated, discarded, submerged and displaced within the psychological and human sciences. The chapter will explore arguments, which suggest that tango requires a listening to/with intent, and a sensing of minimal bodily movements responding before they are registered at the level of conscious cognition. These modes of somatic attention point towards modes of communication that trouble separation, boundedness and singularity, and which reveal how bodies (human and non-human) are always in a process of becoming. The dynamics of relation that Tango requires and makes possible will be explored as part of a queer politics of hope, optimism and vitality. It will explore how Tango as a figuration usurps and dethrones the largely sedentary philosopher and his Cartesian thinking from its position and considers what our conceptions of the body might have looked like if the queer dancing body had provided a model for philosophical thinking.