Straight White Men Can’t Dance

<p><b><i>Straight White Men Can’t Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture </i>investigates a trope proliferating throughout popular American media over the last half-century: that straight white men can’t dance.</b><br><br>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 <i>good </i>dancing to more securely sit within hegemonic masculinity.<br><br>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 <i>hip </i>currency of blackness to affirm their (dancing) masculinity through theft and positionality.<br><br>By revealing how dance in American popular media reifies and problematizes gendered and racialized economies, <i>Straight White Men Can’t Dance </i>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.</p>