When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders (review)

With a dozen essays and another seventeen narratives from individual performers/choreographers, When Men Dance uses both scholarship and anecdote to inquire into how masculinity takes shape through dance and what the effects of such constructions might be. The juxtaposition of one or more personal narratives with each essay attempts to contextualize the more traditional academic work, illustrating how a specific company member's experience (such as Christian Burns') correlates with the analysis of classical gendered norms transformed through Alonzo King's LINES ballet, or suggesting how a methodology of reading periodicals concerning baroque dance might inform the practice of its historical reconstruction. In this manner, the book is ambitious. Based on the editors' contacts and predilections, it covers a vast array of dance forms originating from several regions of the world. Certainly this scope, both in terms of prose-style and geography, is likely to interest readers of many sorts—from the scholar to the amateur dance student. But this movement across so many genres would also benefit from a bold theorization of the volume's titular topic to showcase the utility of this scholarly project, if not to maintain overall cohesion. Here the collection stumbles.

The book's Introduction offers a general overview of theories relating to masculinity and quickly proceeds to emphasize the ways in which dance elicits a trio of phobias (choreo, homo, and effemino). These analytical categories are explored through the book's somewhat illogical tripartite structure: "issues in the pink and blue west," "historical perspectives," and "legacies of colonialism." While the first section focuses ostensibly on ballet and (Western) modern dance, the importance of these forms is never thoroughly articulated. If the point of their inclusion is to frame masculinity, might more work on hip-hop or even gogo boys be of value? In other words, what is productive about using concert dance as the initial set of examples? The second section is rather incoherent because almost all the contributions in this book offer some analysis of narratives framing the past. Perhaps particular problems in historiography animate this section, but an elaboration of these issues and the stakes involved never appears to orient the reader to their grouping. Instead, the Introduction states that Section Two looks at particular time periods, but the purpose of highlighting these historical moments never emerges. Finally, in setting up the last section, the editors miss the opportunity to explain in detail the relationship between the last third of the book and the first two. They posit that the reader should see links between choreophobia and orientalism. This guidepost is a bit inadequate. Does ending with a focus on the "Islamic Middle East and India" help us to understand history differently (22)? Why are these regions particularly important to choreographing masculinity? What are the relationships among ballet and the various folk or state-supported "traditional" forms discussed, given the emphasis in the first third of the book? Should we understand terms like homophobia differently when applied to cultural contexts where the individual sexualized subject emerges as a discrepant formation to local erotic practices?

Although the framing of the book's constituent pieces might have been strengthened, the individual contributions frequently provide provocative, often contrasting, insights into the ways that masculinity is articulated through movement. Maura Keefe offers a genealogy that traces the use of sport from Nijinsky through Shawn and Tharpe to Dancing with the Stars. The historical reach in this essay partners well with Yvonne Hardt's take on expressionist dance in Germany during the 1920s-1930s. To shift from the first essay and its focus on specific choreographers or events to ausdruckstanz, which informed a certain moment of nation building, enables the reader to see changes in scale. Whereas Keefe showcases individuals, Hardt shifts to masses and the communities that challenge national formation and the processes of mechanization associated with capital.

Many of the other pieces provide thick descriptions of movement vocabularies that construct masculinities in...