When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders

by Jennifer Fisher (Editor), Anthony Shay (Editor)

While dance has always been as demanding as contact sports, intuitive boundaries distinguish the two forms of performance for men. Dance is often regarded as a feminine activity, and men who dance are frequently stereotyped as suspect, gay, or somehow unnatural. But what really happens when men dance?

When Men Dance offers a progressive vision that boldly articulates double-standards in gender construction within dance and brings hidden histories to light in a globalized debate. A first of its kind, this trenchant look at the stereotypes and realities of male dancing brings together contributions from leading and rising scholars of dance from around the world to explore what happens when men dance. The dancing male body emerges in its many contexts, from the ballet, modern, and popular dance worlds to stages in Georgian and Victorian England, Weimar Germany, India and the Middle East. The men who dance and those who analyze them tell stories that will be both familiar and surprising for insiders and outsiders alike.

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

A former dancer, actor and journalist, Jennifer Fisher, Ph.D. is a professor of dance studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Reviews

[Deirdre Kelly · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jennifer Fisher calls my dance writing "breathless," "gossipy," and "simplistic," a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Her essay, Maverick Men in Ballet, is sloppy, self-aggrandizing and intellectually shallow. "Like the ballerina, the male ballet dancer is well advised to take the stereotypes of passivity and too much fairyland, if you will, and reinterpret them." Huh?? Saving this generally turgid book from obscurity is Maura Keefe's cogent and highly relevant essay, Is Dance a Man's Sport Too?, and the well-researched and informative, Choreographing Masculinity, a study of male dancing in Egypt, Iran and Uzbekistan, by the distinguished scholar, Anthony Shay. This latter essay, however, avoids identifying the boy dancers of Afghanistan, the bacha bazi, as child sex slaves, often kidnapped to be groomed as dancers whose job is also to allow themselves to raped following a performance. This is a glaring omission.

[Meiver · Rating 4 out of 5]

- In addition to academic essays, book includes choreographers and dancer's voices in the forms of short personal narratives or biographical essays.
- This book was successfully used in a "Men Dancing" gender studies class, that was complemented with additional readings connecting dance history with race and sexuality, particularly issues around blackness and minstrelsy and queer dance history.