Professor Desirée J. Garcia's article "What's Happened to Chorus Girls?": Domesticity and the Postwar Backstage Musical was published in the Fifth Issue of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS).
Desirée Garcia is an associate professor in the Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies program at Dartmouth. She is the author of The Movie Musical (2021) and The Migration of Musical Film: From Ethnic Margins to American Mainstream (2014).
Abstract:
This article examines an unidentified cycle of popular films in the postwar era: the domestic-themed backstage musical. These films have since received relatively little scholarly attention. Musicals such as Mother Wore Tights (Walter Lang, 1947) reflected contemporary social tensions about the endurance of marriage and the relationship between mothers and children by incorporating themes of divorce, suicide, and miscarriage into the otherwise entertainment-oriented genre. In particular, I focus on how the backstage setting itself became domesticized with increasing narrative emphasis placed on the private space of the dressing room.