Examining the first phase of a three-year study of adolescent boys engaged in preprofessional dance training, Doug Risner's "Stigma and Perseverance in the Lives of Boys Who Dance: An Empirical Study of Male Identities in Western Theatrical Dance Training" broadly identifies the challenges facing male students pursuing dance education. His book aims to quantify the "stigma and perseverance" these youth face and qualify how dance instructors may (not) be reinforcing homophobic norms connected to the dance field and larger gendered assumptions of dance as an aesthetic/physical pursuit. Through survey, interview, and ethnographic research, a fairly rigorous review of the literature, and thorough intertextual analyses of these multiple data forms, Risner renders these (inadvertent) prohibitions constructing the marginality of preprofessional dance training of the adolescent male.