Straight White Men Can’t Dance

American popular culture presents straight white men as either dancing badly or refusing to dance. With this phenomenon at its centre, Addie Tsai's book analyses movement from white men on screen in order to discern how dance in American popular culture reflects gender and race ideologies. In particular, it focuses on how the 'straight white man can't dance' trope is used to leverage status and influence.

Why it is then that this trope continues to be perpetuated across American popular culture when it contributes to homophobic, sexist and racist oppressions?

Looking back through history for early iterations of this trope, the book demonstrates how both minstrelsy and vaudeville are instrumental in providing a historic model for ethnic mimicry in dance - ie. what it means to dance "white" as opposed to what it means to dance "Black".

This book challenges how these choreographies reinforce or subvert traditional norms of gender and race, and illustrates how dance can reinforce outdated or complicated modes of gender and racial identity within American popular culture.