ABSTRACT
This chapter examines theories around the spectacle and the gendered gaze, the performativity of gender, issues around dance and ethnicity, and discussions of presence, concluding with discussions of the male role in duets, and men dancing violently. It is concerned with the ways that theatrical codes and conventions create meanings that can support or challenge normative ideas about masculinity, together with gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and other components of identities. To understand what these codes and conventions are and how they operate, it adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on feminist, queer, and postcolonial theory, together with work in the fields of art history, film, theatre, and performance studies as well as dance theory. Through a discussion of these, it identifies, in broad terms, some of the main ways in which representation and performativity are supposed to conform to dominant ideas about masculinity, the extent to which theatre dance reinforces these ideas, but indicates that there is nevertheless a potential for creating alternatives by troubling and subverting their dominance.
