The Dressing Room

"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 Sound of Musicals