Dance Music Reckonings: Authenticity, Whiteness, and Toxic Masculinity

Dance music—like so many industries today—is in the middle of multiple reckonings. This chapter offers some tools for making sense of these reckonings. First, I outline the ongoing importance of authenticity to digital media broadly and dance music specifically. Next, I connect digital media with dance music scholarship, calling for work that interrogates how digital media is impacting dance music and vice versa. Returning to authenticity, I outline Dubrofsky’s (2022) authenticating whiteness—a theoretical framework that shows how authenticity is often used as a strategy of whiteness. In the analysis, I apply this theoretical framework to a few moments in dance music culture, examining how whiteness and masculinity often operate and, relatedly, how industry workers, clubs, and clubbers alike are resisting and reshaping problematic cultural trends attached to whiteness, authenticity, and masculinity. I end with a call for future work that continues to interrogate whiteness and (toxic) masculinity, a project that aims to directly address unrelenting inequities in dance music spaces.