BOOK LAUNCH PARTY: "Straight White Men Can’t Dance" by Addie Tsai

All book lovers and those who enjoy pop culture are invited to a special book launch party for "Straight White Men Can't Dance: American Masculinity in Film and Popular Culture" by Addie Tsai on Thursday, November 13, from 5 to 8 PM.

investigates a trope proliferating throughout popular American media over the last half-century: that straight white men can't dance.

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.

Two other titles by Tsai, Unwieldy Creatures and Dear Twin, will be available for purchase and signing at the event. For more information on Addie Tsai and her writing, please visit www.addietsai.com.

Blue Bee Cider tasting room on 4811 Bethlehem Road. There is plenty of parking on & off site, but please read the directions here and be mindful of where you should/shouldn't park.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Sarah Choi