Men who dance: aesthetics, athletics and the art of masculinity

Why do men do ballet? What kinds of men become theatrical dancers? In this highly original piece of research, Michael Gard shows how the worlds of Western theatrical dance, gender relations and sexuality intermingle and, over time, produce different answers to these questions. Surveying both academic and popular writers, as well as drawing on life history interviews with twenty male dancers, Gard argues that the answers to these questions are inextricably linked to another question whose answer is never the same at any moment in history or any place in culture: What is a man?