Tango, Touch, and Moving Multiplicities

Abstract

Within the nation’s official narratives, the body becomes normalized as that which either contains or is contained by the nation as exclusive territory, relegating the gendered body to either the inside or the outside of the nation’s domestic chronotope. As a result, the intelligibility of the engendered body becomes dependent on its representation within the captivity of what the discourse of the nation considers to be the “norm,” where, traditionally, the political public space (the polis) is defined through the presence of (white) men and contrasted to the apolitical private space (the home) of women. One of the disturbing paradoxes of this situation is the consequence that disenfranchised groups—such as women, racial others, immigrants, and native peoples— often feel they have no other choice but to turn to the nation or to national values in order to register their claims as political. Turning to the nation will only reproduce normative en-genderings. More often than not, these normative en-genderings are located within strict matrices of identity. Rather than turning to the language of the nation for an articulation of the political, what is necessary is a double-voiced attempt to resist the normative constraints that, for example, make gender “matter,” while concurrently revealing the ways in which the normalization of this very materiality is what enables the nation to relegate “woman” to the margins of the political.