Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on Dubai's community of Argentine tango dancers. It explores how their embodied and discursive practices oscillate between belonging and non-belonging in the context of a highly transient and transnational urban environment.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will focus on Dubai's community of Argentine tango dancers whose embodied and discursive practices oscillate between belonging and non-belonging in the context of a highly transient and transnational urban environment.

Dubai is a city of strangers. Over 90 percent of its residents are foreigners who temporarily live and work in the city. Having de facto no access to Emirati citizenship creates a pervasive sense of impermanence among Dubai's foreign residents. However, beyond the formal structure of citizenship, recent studies have shown how Dubai's migrants engage in various forms of belonging, from establishing practical support networks to appropriating urban spaces and sharing leisure activities. While these studies illustrate the tensions between processes of inclusion and exclusion, they rarely address the emotional dimension of migrants' "permanent temporariness" (Vora 2013) and the challenge to negotiate their "geographies of the heart" (Walsh 2006).

My paper will show how the practices of Dubai's tangueros simultaneously engender feelings of belonging and non-belonging. The study explores, on the one hand, how the "instant intimacy" (Törnqvist 2018) created through tango dancing helps Dubai's tangueros to create a sense of home and thus transforms their perceptions of Dubai and their attachment to the city. Yet, the paper also illustrates how the liminoid time/space of tango allows for forms of "play" that are at odds with Dubai's sociocultural environment. Tango thus transports Dubai's dancers to an imaginary "elsewhere" and connects them with the transnational community of tango enthusiasts.