Straight White Men Can’t Dance

American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture

Addie Tsai (William & Mary, USA)

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Hardback

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
18 September 2025

Film theory & criticism; Dance; Popular culture; Gender studies: men; Ethnic studies

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.

By: Addie Tsai (William & Mary USA)
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 238mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 960g
ISBN: 9781350443563
ISBN 10: 1350443565
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 18 September 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Addie Tsai is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, USA, where she is Affiliate Faculty in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. She is the author of Dear Twin (2019), included in American Library Association’s Rainbow List in 2021, and Unwieldy Creatures (2022), a Shirley Jackson finalist for Best Novel. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. She is the founding editor in chief for just femme & dandy. Her articles have been published in LO:TECH:POP:CULT: Screendance Remixed (2024), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Dance and Philosophy (2021), Slapstick: An Interdisciplinary Companion (2021), and The International Journal of Screendance.