The Dressing Room

A recurrent and popular setting in American cinema, the dressing room has captured the imaginations of filmmakers and audiences for over a century. In The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film, the only book-length study of the space, author DesirÉe J. Garcia explores how dressing rooms are dynamic realms in which a diverse cast of performers are made and exposed. Garcia analyzes the backstage film, which spans film history, modes, and genre, to show how dressing rooms have been a useful space for filmmakers to examine the performativity of American life. From the Black maid to the wife and mother to the leading man, dressing rooms navigate, shape, and challenge society’s norms. The stakes are high in dressing rooms, Garcia argues, because they rehearse larger questions about identity and its performance, negotiating who can succeed and who cannot and on what terms. 

"With examples ranging from Raging Bull to Funny Girl, from Joker to Paris is Burning, Desiree Garcia convincingly argues for the dressing room as a centrally important space across cinema, where it functions variously as both a domestic space and a workspace; a performance space; a space of encounter or solitude, hope or anxiety; a space of transformation, cross-dressing and masquerade; a space that is private but porous, transitory but defining, familiar but uncanny.  Deeply attuned to the identities of its inhabitants, Garcia shines a light on shifting ideologies around race, sex, and gender as they manifest in the dressing room."
  - Pamela Robertson Wojcik (author of Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction) "Before reading this original, well-researched, and always insightful book, I had not appreciated the dressing room as a pervasive setting in Hollywood cinema from the silent era to the present day. With her expansive, historically dense scope and careful attention to detail, Garcia examines this setting as more than just an element in the mise-en-scÈne. She convincingly shows how over the decades the dressing room has provided an important filmic space for working out conflicts of gender, race, and class that still define American culture."
  - Steven Cohan (author of Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies and The S)

DESIRÉE J. GARCIA is an associate professor in the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies Department at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire. She is the author of The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (Rutgers University Press, 2014) and The Movie Musical (Rutgers University Press, 2021).

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