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Straight White Men Can’t Dance - Addie Tsai

Straight White Men Can’t Dance

American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture

(Autor)

Buch | Hardcover
216 Seiten
2025
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
9781350443563 (ISBN)
CHF 143,00 inkl. MwSt
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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.
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.

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.

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

Erscheinungsdatum
Verlagsort London
Sprache englisch
Maße 156 x 238 mm
Gewicht 960 g
Themenwelt Kunst / Musik / Theater Film / TV
Sachbuch/Ratgeber Sport Tanzen / Tanzsport
Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie
Sozialwissenschaften Kommunikation / Medien Medienwissenschaft
Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie Gender Studies
ISBN-13 9781350443563 / 9781350443563
Zustand Neuware
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