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.
This book analyses movement from white men on screen in order to discern how dance in American popular culture reflects gender and race ideologies. In particular, it focuses on the 'straight white man can't dance' trope and how it is used to leverage status and influence.
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This book analyses movement from white men on screen in order to discern how dance in American popular culture reflects gender and race ideologies. In particular, it focuses on the 'straight white man can't dance' trope and how it is used to leverage status and influence.
Introduction
Chapter 1: Tripping the White Mantastic: The (Straight) White Man Dance
Trope
Chapter 2: Magic Mike, Dirty Dancing, and the (Empty) Promise of
Heteromasculinity
Chapter 3: The White Man Dancer as Man-Child
Chapter 4: The White Man Dancer as Gay Panic
Chapter 5: The White Man Dancer as Slapstick Parody
Chapter 6: The White Teen Dancer as Cross-Racial Exchange
Chapter 7: The White Man Dancer as Mailer's "White Negro"
Chapter 8: The White Man Dancer as Disempowered Animation
Coda: The White Mad Dancer as Spectacular Cakewalk
Index
Addie Tsai is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, USA, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Womens Studies. She is the author of Dear Twin (2019), included in American Library Associations 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.
