Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Straight White Men Can't Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture

Straight White Men Can't Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture

Tsai, Addie

Hardcover

DanceGeneral Gender Studies

ISBN10: 1350443565
ISBN13: 9781350443563
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: Sep 18 2025
Pages: 216
Weight: 1.05
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

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.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Tsai, Addie

View All

Also in

Dance

View All