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Of Arnold, the instructor says, ‘Arnold doesn’t dance. In one of the cassette’s segments, Howard must resist the temptation to dance while the tape plays ‘I Will Survive’ and the stern macho instructor implores Howard to think about real men like John Wayne and Arnold Swartznegger.
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When small town high school teacher Howard Brackett, who initially thinks of himself as straight, is outed on national television, he turns to a home-improvement cassette program entitled ‘Exploring Your Masculinity’ to teach himself how to appear to be straight. The film In and Out (1997) explicitly spells out popular Western prejudices about dance and their connections to gender and sexuality. Indeed, even in Mulvey’s discussion of cinematic spectatorship, to-be-looked-at-ness is embodied by women, not by men. These boys and men do not fit into the codes of dance in ways we expect.
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Yet in these dance films it is the dancers who surprise us, for they are not who we expect to see. We do not usually have problems distinguishing between a ballet and a striptease show, for example. And it is these codes that make dance easy to read. Dance is coded in terms of steps, scores, styles, genres. Contrary to popular understandings of dance (as liberating, etc.), dance is among the most strictly coded performances we have. The dance is comforting because it is readable. For what is so interesting about the ‘look here’ space of dance in dance films featuring male masculinity crises is that when we look at dance, we are both comforted and surprised. But here, dance (and particularly dance in films about male masculinity crises) gets complicated. What makes spectacles so gripping is their demand to be read. In this respect, dance is no different from any other spectacle or even performance. By making us look at it, dance also asks us to read it. Dance is a space that is brimming with what Laura Mulvey has called ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ (also see Cohan). We popularly think of dance in these ways because dance marks a space in which corporeality is offered to us as a rhythmic, mobile spectacle. Dance is commonly thought of as liberating, transformative, empowering, transgressive, and even as dangerous. Popularly, many meanings of dance circulate in contemporary Western cultures. Yet this choice of dance might make more sense if we consider how we popularly think about dance and how dance contributes to the construction of a cultural identity, understood as ‘how one’s body renders meaning in society’ (Albright, xxiii). At least initially, dance seems like an odd genre choice for films suturing male masculinity crises to make. Approached genealogically (as Susan Leigh Foster does) or philosophically (as Graham McFee does), conclusions of dance theorists about dance are similar - ‘what we understand as dance is dance’ (65). For they all beg the question, ‘Why dance?’ In addressing this question, I want to resist the impulse to say what dance is. What intrigues me about these films is their engagements with dance. Somehow, somewhere, men engage with dance to at least temporarily emerge as forthrightly masculine. While variations abound in the implementation of this formula, the basic pattern in each film is the same.
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So pervasive is this trend in films like Strictly Ballroom (1992), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994),The Full Monty (1997), and now Billy Elliot (2000) that there even seems to be something of a formula guiding it - disturbing or disturbed femininity triggers a masculinity crisis which results in dance being set up as the recuperative cinematic space of mainly white male masculinity (Somerville). In the 1990s and into the new millennium, men suffering from masculinity crises often engage with dance in order to once again make a credible claim to their masculinity. A striking thing seems to be happening in contemporary male dance films.