Abstract
I am a man who refuses to be pulled on the dance floor despite the insistence of friends and family. I never really considered the origin of my inability to dance. I have always thought that it was solely due to a lack of skill. Maxine Leeds Craig’s Sorry I Don’t Dance: Why Men Refuse to Move? reveals larger social and cultural forces behind this seemingly private choice. Craig’s research suggests that my inability to dance might be tied to a historical restriction of dance for white, heterosexual males, starting in the 1930s.
Sorry I Don’t Dance provides insight into how different constructs of masculinities shape men’s perceptions of their bodies and affect their movement in social space. Craig explores how men hold their bodies, move in space, use gestures, and how their relationships with dance are a powerful and underexplored aspect of their gender identities and performances. She suggests that men’s resistance to dance relates to the ways in which they experience gender. She analyzes intersections between gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in exploring the reasons men dance (or do not dance). She suggests we consider masculinities from a performative and “anti-performative” perspective—as a great deal of demonstrating masculinity often involves elaborate anti-performance (p. 11).
Craig argues that American men abandoned the dance floor in the twentieth century due to the emergence of a white middle-class heterosexual, hegemonic masculinity, which encouraged an unemotional, unsexual, reserved, and minimally expressive body. Boys and men internalized this form of maleness in order to achieve (or maintain) a position of dominance. This differentiated them from physical expressiveness and sensuality, qualities considered acceptable for men of color, gay men, and women—but not straight, white men.
The first part of the book primarily relies on archival and published sources to provide a historical perspective of the complex relations between manhood and dancing in the United States. Craig found that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the popular images of dancing men were of marginalized European immigrants, segregated black men, immoral criminals, and foolish and immature college boys. By the 1930s, it became common sense for respectable white men, even those with dancing skills, to refrain from dancing. This new common sense was inculcated to such an extent that it suppressed other popular images such as the upper-class ballroom cotillion leader at the turn of the century, the college student kicking of the Charleston in the 1920s, the jitterbugging GI during World War II, the Twist or the Mashed Potato dancers in the 1960s, and the Disco-dancing clubbers in the 1970s. As Craig writes, “Common sense shapes practice, and practice shapes our bodies. Practicing some activities and avoiding others, boys remake their bodies” (p. 188). Boys’ bodies develop under a racist, xenophobic, femiphobic, and homophobic regime, rendering them motionless and inexpressive.
After many white, middle-class, straight men had deserted the dance floor, who continued occupying it night after night? It was men of color, gay men, and women who kept dancing; their social marginality had a liberating effect. Because they were already low in the social status, they had nothing to lose by continuing to dance. Craig studies this resistance to the hegemonic model of masculinity, exploring the ways in which men develop the habits of a dancer. Based on data from interviews with fifty men and participant observation in a college dance class, her research is about men’s attitudes toward recreational dancing. The book’s last four chapters focus on the relations between dance and sex, the social context that establishes habitus of dancers or sitters out, and the racial meanings attached to dancing. Based on African American, Chicano, and Filipino men’s experiences, Craig underscores two main factors in formulating a dancer’s habitus. First is “home bopping,” which refers to “[a] home environment […] in which physical responses to music are casually incorporated into family’s everyday life” (p. 139). A second factor is the message that dancing is an established tradition in the family and that a well-rounded man would be expected to have the skill of dance. Craig believes that these factors challenge and complicate the concept of hegemonic masculinity and enable the development of alternative models of masculinities.
Sorry I Don’t Dance is a coherent and well-organized study tracing the extended and interrelated processes of racialization and gender reconfiguration that led to masculinity’s exclusion of recreational dancing. The historical and empirical evidence Craig presents work well with one another. But, Craig’s finest achievement is showing how major findings, ideas, and concepts from gender studies, feminist theories, queer theories, and theories of masculinities are manifested in a common, mundane activity like dancing. This fascinating and interdisciplinary book demonstrates holistically that the male body, supposedly natural, is a social and cultural arena on which the struggle to define true masculinity takes place.