the dressing room: backstage lives and american film

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.

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).