{"product_id":"straight-white-men-can-t-dance-1","title":"Straight White Men Can’t Dance","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eStraight White Men Can’t Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture \u003c\/i\u003einvestigates a trope proliferating throughout popular American media over the last half-century: that straight white men can’t dance.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAddie 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 \u003ci\u003egood \u003c\/i\u003edancing to more securely sit within hegemonic masculinity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTsai 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 \u003ci\u003ehip \u003c\/i\u003ecurrency of blackness to affirm their (dancing) masculinity through theft and positionality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBy revealing how dance in American popular media reifies and problematizes gendered and racialized economies, \u003ci\u003eStraight White Men Can’t Dance \u003c\/i\u003edemonstrates 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Bloomsbury Publishing PLC","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56981524087128,"sku":"9781350443570","price":36.5,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/agendabookshop.com\/products\/straight-white-men-can-t-dance-1","provider":"Agenda Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}