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In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879–1947) was one of the most famous women in America. She established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 and at the height of a long career, that stretched until the early 1930s, she was a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. She was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality. This book tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. The book follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. The book is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.

In West Java, Indonesia, all it takes is a woman's voice and a drum beat to make a man get up and dance. Every day, men there—be they students, pedicab drivers, civil servants, or businessmen—breach ordinary standards of decorum and succumb to the rhythm at village ceremonies, weddings, political rallies, and nightclubs. The music the men dance to varies from traditional gong ensembles to the contemporary pop known as dangdut, but they consistently dance with great enthusiasm. This book draws on decades of ethnographic research to explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, arguing that Sundanese men use dance to explore and enact contradictions in their gender identities. Framing the three crucial elements of Sundanese dance—the female entertainer, the drumming, and men's sense of freedom—as a triangle, the book connects them to a range of other theoretical perspectives, drawing on thinkers from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lév–Strauss, and Freud to Euclid. By granting men permission to literally perform their masculinity, the book ultimately concludes, dance provides a crucial space for both reinforcing and resisting orthodox gender ideologies.