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 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.

praise for
Straight White Men Can’t Dance

Addie Tsai convincingly unpacks forty years of film, television, and music videos to reveal how awkward moves, gay panics, and racial appropriation shape constructions of white masculinity dancing on screen. Provocative close readings reveal how dance becomes a battleground for gender, race, and power. Smart and sharp essential reading for anyone curious about what's really at stake when white men hit the dance floor.

—Thomas DeFrantz
Author of Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture

Tsai’s Straight White Men Can’t Dance examines America’s obsession with white, heteronormative masculinity through movement—who gets to dance, when, with whom, and how well. Weaving together histories of public health, capitalism, the entertainment industry, and cultural appropriation, Tsai’s study reveals the confounding irony of the white male dancing body in a society intent on preserving narrow notions of what it means to be a man in relation to other men, other genders, and the broader social world. As a text that deals foremost with these themes at the intersection of the body and the screen, it expands our understanding of the socio-political power of screen-based media and how images can influence our understanding of ourselves and each other. Mandatory reading for those interested in screendance, gender studies, queer studies, performance studies, and more.

—Cara Hagan
Author of Screendance from Film to Festival: Celebration and Curatorial Practice

Straight White Men Can’t Dance is both a critique and a celebration of pop culture’s messiness – a book that’ll make you see familiar movies and TV moments in a totally new light.

—Louise Penn
London Arts critic/Critics’ Circle Member

This is a superb book for anyone curious about how media, historically and currently, contribute to and undergird systemic exclusions. Tsai offers a wonderful example of interdisciplinary research that benefits dance studies, film studies, gender studies, gender studies, queer studies, critical race studies, media studies, and communication studies.

—Kate Mattingly
Author of Shaping Dance Canons: Criticism, Aesthetics, and Equity