About the Author

Michael Gard is Senior Lecturer in Education at Charles Sturt University in New South Wales, Australia. He has an undergraduate degree in physical education, a master’s degree in sports science and a Ph.D. in gender studies. He teaches, writes and has published articles and book chapters on dance, the human body, sexuality and the shortcomings of biological determinism in all its forms. With Jan Wright he is the co-author of The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology (2005). He is also working on a biography of Robert Helpmann, Australia’s greatest ballet dancer.

Book Description

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?