Straight White Men Can’t Dance

Addie Tsai is Addie is an Associate Teaching Professor of Creative Writing at William & Mary, USA. 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.

• IntroductionChapter 1: Tripping the White Mantastic: The (Straight) White Man Dance TropeChapter 2: Magic Mike, Dirty Dancing, and the (Empty) Promise of HeteromasculinityChapter 3: The White Man Dancer as Man-ChildChapter 4: The White Man Dancer as Gay PanicChapter 5: The White Man Dancer as Slapstick ParodyChapter 6: The White Teen Dancer as Cross-Racial ExchangeChapter 7: The White Man Dancer as Mailer's "White Negro"Chapter 8: The White Man Dancer as Disempowered AnimationCoda: The White Mad Dancer as Spectacular CakewalkIndex

One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in its ability to render visible what has long remained culturally familiar yet largely critically unexamined ... Tsai reveals how popular media repeatedly disguises structures of racial and masculine power beneath the aesthetics of vulnerability, humor, and self-deprecation. In doing so, Straight White Men Can’t Dance transforms a widely recognizable trope into a compelling site of critical inquiry.