DESIRÉE GARCIA (Dartmouth College) work in progress: 'Masquerades in the Dressing Room: Race, Gender, and Cross-Dressing in Backstage Film'

Garcia will share an excerpt from her book manuscript, The Dressing Room: Backstage Lives and American Film. She proposes a new way of thinking about space and genre in film history, using the backstage dressing room to explore how American film has shaped and defined the social actors we find there.

The chapter we will discuss, “Masqueraders,” considers the haunting of dressing rooms by racialized performance such as blackface minstrelsy but also how masquerade can be empowering for women, people of color, and queer people.

Contact Eline Santema for the reading (e.t.santema rug.nl).