eBook - ePub

Straight White Men Can’t Dance

Name: Straight White Men Can’t Dance
ISBN: 9781350443594

American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture

Addie Tsai,

English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Straight White Men Can’t Dance

American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture

Addie Tsai,

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Straight White Men Can’t Dance by Addie Tsai in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Media & Performing Arts & Popular Culture in Art. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.