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Straight White Men Can't Dance
By Addie Tsai
0 - Default Title
Description
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 gooddancing 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 hipcurrency 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 Dancedemonstrates 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.
Product details
Edition:
1
Number of Pages:
212
Release Date:
2025-09-18
Publication Date:
2025-09-18
Publisher:
Bloomsbury Academic
Languages:
Original:
English
ISBN10:
1350443565
ISBN13:
9781350443563
Weight:
487 g
Height:
161 cm
Width:
240 cm
Thickness:
16 cm
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