"Nobody puts Baby in a corner" : an analysis of Dirty Dancing with a gender and class perspective

Sammanfattning: This paper analyzes how Hollywood portrays gender and class in films through dance, more specifically in Emile Adrolino’s Dirty Dancing (1987). Due to the film’s immense popularity, it has become a cultural phenomenon and a part of the fabric of our society’s cultural context. This paper examines how Hollywood uses certain narratives to tell a story and how the art of dancing can be used as a tool within a storytelling structure. This paper will be looking closely at Johnny, the handsome main dance instructor of a Catskills resort which the protagonist, Baby, becomes infatuated with, and how his character is written to be typically masculine or not, based on Connell’s theory of masculinity. Additionally, Bourdieu’s theory is used as a tool to examine how class differences are portrayed in the film.