Straight White Men Can’t Dance

American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture

AvAddie Tsai

Häftad, Engelska, 2026

412 kr

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Beskrivning

Straight White Men Can’t Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture investigates a trope proliferating throughout popular American media over the last half-century: that straight white men can’t dance.Addie Tsai traces this reiterative moving image of vaudevillian buffoonery in film, television, and video from the mid-1980s to present-day. During the height of homophobic hysteria in response to the AIDS epidemic, dance began to be used as a marker to scrutinize white men’s position within homosexuality and masculinity. Therefore, white men could misperform good dancing to more securely sit within hegemonic masculinity.Tsai establishes how ethnic mimicry within American popular media, even that of white masculinity, is produced and reiterated from the 19th-century theatrical practice of blackface minstrelsy. This history resurfaces in one of the exceptions to the trope: when white men use the hip currency of blackness to affirm their (dancing) masculinity through theft and positionality.By revealing how dance in American popular media reifies and problematizes gendered and racialized economies, Straight White Men Can’t Dance demonstrates how the image of the buffoonish white male dancer operates as a smokescreen for the more violent manipulative forces of the reigning figure of white supremacy.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2026-09-17
Mått:156 x 234 x undefined mm
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:216
Förlag:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN:9781350443570

Utforska kategorier

Film inom Kultur
Dansare / koreografer inom Kultur
Kulturvetenskap inom Samhälle och politik

Mer om författaren

Addie Tsai is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, USA, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She is the author of Dear Twin (2019), included in American Library Association’s Rainbow List in 2021, and Unwieldy Creatures (2022), a Shirley Jackson finalist for Best Novel. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. She is the founding editor in chief for just femme & dandy. Her articles have been published in LO:TECH:POP:CULT: Screendance Remixed (2024), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy (2021), Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion (2021), and The International Journal of Screendance.

Recensioner i media

Addie Tsai convincingly unpacks forty years of film, television, and music videos to reveal how awkward moves, gay panics, and racial appropriation shape constructions of white masculinity dancing on screen. Provocative close readings reveal how dance becomes a battleground for gender, race, and power. Smart and sharp essential reading for anyone curious about what’s really at stake when white men hit the dance floor.

Innehållsförteckning

IntroductionChapter 1: Tripping the White Mantastic: The (Straight) White Man Dance TropeChapter 2: Magic Mike, Dirty Dancing, and the (Empty) Promise of HeteromasculinityChapter 3: The White Man Dancer as Man-ChildChapter 4: The White Man Dancer as Gay PanicChapter 5: The White Man Dancer as Slapstick ParodyChapter 6: The White Teen Dancer as Cross-Racial ExchangeChapter 7: The White Man Dancer as Mailer's "White Negro"Chapter 8: The White Man Dancer as Disempowered AnimationCoda: The White Mad Dancer as Spectacular CakewalkIndex