1The early 1980s saw the release of several films centred around cross-dressing characters including Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982), Yentl (Barbra Streisand, 1983), and Victor/Victoria (Blake Edwards, 1982). Writing at the time of Tootsie’s release in December 1982, Gregg Kilday argued that these films were “reflecting the influence of the ongoing feminist movement” by asking audiences to “rethink conventional sex roles and sexual stereotyping” (1982: 6). It is significant that Kilday frames these films in terms of their progressive feminist politics rather than their appropriation of trans* identity, and as such Tootsie, Yentl, and Victor/Victoria have all since been the subject of criticism in terms of this exploitative usage of transness. As Chris Straayer argues in Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies, the success of such films with mass audiences is in part due to their offering of “a common fantasy of overthrowing gender constructions without challenging sexual difference,” with spectators comfortable in the knowledge that the protagonist’s “momentary, vicarious trespassing of society’s accepted boundaries” will be resolved within the “orderly demarcations reconstituted by the films’ endings” (1996: 42–43).
2Tootsie does in many ways conform to this pattern of briefly opening up trans* possibilities before a definitive restoration of the binary. The film revolves around struggling actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) who, driven by desperation from his lack of work, decides to present himself as a woman, Dorothy Michaels, in order to get a role on the fictional soap opera Southwest General. The plan works and Dorothy becomes a national star, appearing on the cover of New York Magazine in a red sequined dress in front of the Stars and Stripes. Michael’s transformation into Dorothy is thus justified by his need for work, establishing what Straayer terms “the narrative necessity for disguise” (1996: 43). My use of the term “cross-dressing” may appear, to use Niall Richardson’s phrase, “rather mechanical” (2010: 121), but it is a helpful term for capturing this trope of narrative justification. As Richardson writes, cross-dressing is a useful way of “describing the lead characters in films such as Tootsie and Mrs Doubtfire who must cross-dress because of employment necessities rather than a desire to create a drag-spectacle or the auto-erotics of transvestitism” (2010: 121).
3It would appear then on a narrative level that Tootsie performs no differently to other films of the early ’80s cycle in exploiting trans* identity as an opportunistic tool, similar to how Barbra Streisand in Yentl disguises herself as Anshel so that she can study the Talmud or Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria transforms herself from the struggling soprano Victoria into the successful nightclub performer Victor. However, Caél M. Keegan has recently proposed a defence for the unique value of Tootsie as a trans* text, arguing that the film offers an “entry into questions about sex and gender deeper than those posed by most of today’s mainstream ‘good’ transgender media” (2022: 29). Keegan argues that many contemporary representations of trans* people work to “assimilate transness” into “the dominant models of gender and sex upon which realist, mediated worlds rely” (2022: 27), thus depicting “transgender difference as just another type of gender performance” and allowing the current gender binary to remain untroubled (2022: 28). He contrasts the recent TV show Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–2019), which prevents the “‘good’ trans object” of Sophia (Laverne Cox) from posing any threat to the gender binary through strategies of “assimilation into the reified category of woman” (2022: 28), to the bad object of Dorothy in Tootsie. Bad objects “refuse to fit neatly within the purportedly closed system of sexual difference” and thus are instead resistant to assimilation into the binary (2022: 29). Keegan sees Hoffman’s character as one such example of a bad object, arguing that instead of the character falling into the category of the “comedic ‘pathetic transsexual,’ who fails to be convincing in their gender performance and functions largely to generate humor” (2022: 29), Dorothy in fact demonstrates the vital contributions that trans women can make towards the feminist movement. Her strong stance against male abuses of power, sternly rebuking the advances of fellow Southwest General cast member John Van Horn (George Gaynes), ultimately suggests that “trans women can make ideal feminist leaders precisely because they are women who were not socialized as such” (2022: 31).
4Keegan’s strong defence of Tootsie highlights the importance of critically engaging with both seemingly dated representations of transness that actually hold real, disruptive value and contemporary media texts that only offer surface-level concessions. He does not however place any focus on the reveal trope and the way in which Tootsie poses a challenge to its problematic mechanics. The most troubling element of cross-dressing films like Yentl and Victor/Victoria is their usage of the reveal, the moment in which the character reveals their trans* status and which, as Danielle M. Seid notes, is “often highly sensationalized, dramatized, or eroticized” (2014: 176). Seid notes further that this reveal often involves a displaying of the character’s genitals, as it does in both Yentl and Victor/Victoria, which, by being depicted as the moment in which the “truth” of their body is revealed, “corrects gender noncompliance, narratively reinscribing a binary gender system as ‘natural’ and desirable” (2014: 177). A sense of finality therefore marks these scenes, returning us to Straayer’s critique of how such films ultimately restore their “orderly demarcations” (1996: 43).
5It is within Tootsie’s negotiation of the reveal trope that I argue the film truly refuses to assimilate its central character back into the binary, offering up a series of moments in which Dorothy balances delicately between multiple identities. The key to this careful balancing act is Hoffman’s impressively versatile performance, of which Keegan again makes no mention of but is crucial to the film’s status as a “bad” object. Hoffman’s emergence as a star through the late 1960s and early 1970s was framed at the time by his unconventionality, with the first ever Time cover photograph from February 1969 featuring the youthful faces of Hoffman and Mia Farrow under the headline “The Young Actors: Stars and Anti-Stars.”1 Hoffman was considered an “anti-star” both in terms of his everyman appearance and his time training at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, an acting coach who was famed for teaching his own version of method acting. This committed approach to performance translated into a series of roles which saw Hoffman taking on a variety of different identities, like Jack Crabb in Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970) who fluctuates between living in the white settler world and as part of the Native American Cheyenne tribe. Hoffman’s dynamic traversal of identity in that film, as his character integrates himself into many different walks of life, showcased many of his performative qualities, particularly his impressive facial control and the remarkably dextrous use of his voice.
6These performance elements are employed by Hoffman with an even greater deftness in Tootsie and become particularly exciting when it comes to the film’s two major reveal scenes, which I argue are powerfully transformed by Hoffman’s versatile presence. The dramatic moment in which Dorothy reveals themselves as Michael, first to their agent George (Sydney Pollack) and later to the cast, crew, and viewers of Southwest General, is complicated by what I describe as a rapid yo-yoing back and forth between both identities that is largely communicated through the actor’s vocal performance. This focus on the voice is significant in several ways, primarily due to the crucial role it plays within the reveal trope in general. Straayer writes that voice is a major element of how the reveal operates in cross-dressing films, “the undermining of costume disguise by seemingly incongruous pitch” serving to perpetuate the “conception that one’s voice represents the true self” (1996: 46). He highlights moments in both the later film Mrs Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993) and Tootsie where the disjunction between the appearance and vocal pitch of the character serves to “humorously remind the audience of ‘natural’ maleness” (1996: 46). I propose, however, that such reinforcements of the voice as the identifier of one’s “true self” are disrupted by Hoffman’s dynamic performance, the actor juggling identities throughout the film’s reveal scenes.
7Over the course of these scenes, the fluctuations between the identities of Dorothy and Michael begin to shift the film away from other cross-dressing films and their restrictive gender-confirming boundaries and closer to modern discourses of transness. I am particularly referring here to the recent shift in trans studies towards the trans* label, a critical shift which I follow throughout this essay through the use of the asterisk. Jack Halberstam explains that this “asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity” (2018: 4). This shift in focus from the destination to the journey “stands at odds with the history of gender variance, which has been collapsed into concise definitions” (2018: 5), the reveal trope being responsible for reinforcing such definitions within cross-dressing films. The yo-yoing energy of Hoffman’s performance in these sequences instead speaks to me as a trace of the inbetweenness that trans* seeks to capture in its many “expansive forms of difference, haptic relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being” (2018: 5). In Shimmering Images, Eliza Steinbock proposes that this inbetweenness of trans* life is rendered both visible and felt within cinema through what they term a “shimmer,” theorising that the “cinematic cuts and sutures between the visual and the spoken, between frames, and between genres are delinking and relinking practices of transfiguration” (2019: 2). They argue that the affective possibilities of cinema, offering to the spectator “novel transversals of sensory perception” (2019: 3), are remarkably similar to the affective nature of the trans* journey, something they describe as a “shimmer of heat rising” (2019: 3). Steinbock writes that “it is my hope that readers invested in the discipline of cinema studies will find their own ampersand constructions in which affective shimmering and cinematic shimmers can be excavated to bring new conceptualizations to form-content relations” (2019: 3), and by analysing the vocal fluctuations within Hoffman’s performance I look to contribute to Steinbock’s theory by arguing that the actor’s work speaks to me as a moment of trans* indeterminacy. Through my analysis I seek to illustrate how the affective nature of cinema and transness is encapsulated in Tootsie through the affective capacities of Hoffman’s vocal performance, which carries to me as spectator the actor’s energetic shifts in identity, thus positioning the film as a radically different negotiation and challenge of the reveal trope.
8Before embarking on my analysis, it is important to acknowledge some major hurdles regarding my approach. Firstly, I am applying various theoretical discourses from recent trans* theory to a media object from the early 1980s, and as I have already touched upon in my acknowledgement that Tootsie does indeed conform to many features of the cross-dressing film, I am proposing a reading that neither the creators of the film nor audiences at the time would probably have been considering. As Jed Samer observes however, for a long time trans* media studies struggled by restricting itself to “the analysis of film and television’s few canonical trans characters,” but “the last five years have seen a renaissance in the field with a number of studies devoted to trans aesthetics, genre studies, and industry studies revealing what is trans about the most mainstream, most popular, and oldest film and television fare” (2022: 175–176). When we consider that Tootsie was the second most popular film of 1982 behind E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) and received 10 Oscar nominations, the traces of trans* energy within the film become radically exciting, raising the possibility that even in the most mainstream fare such transgressive potentialities can be located and felt.
9Another issue is with my application of trans* theory to a performance from a cisgender actor. Again, it is highly unlikely that Hoffman was intending to explore trans* identity in any meaningful sense within his work and a look at his promotional efforts for the film reveal as such, with the actor cracking dated jokes about his son seeing him dressed as Dorothy and that “luckily we can afford therapy for him later” (Travers, 1983: 69). Despite this seeming lack of awareness from the performer, I again find it fruitful to look to Samer’s trans* reading of the work of Charlie Chaplin. Samer analyses how the cisgender silent film star “through a pantomime of agile, embodied shifts across not only gender but also species and kingdom, gave early moving image to trans phenomenology” (2022: 176), demonstrating how, Samer quoting from Alexander Doty, “queer positions, queer readings, and queer pleasures are part of a reception space that stands simultaneously beside and within that created by heterosexuals and straight positions” (1993: 15). Thus interpreting a cisgendered performance from a queer stance can further demonstrate the integral nature of such subject positions to all areas of life both now and across history and serves to emphasise that spectator experiences can span across all manner of subjectivities.
10Whereas Samer is writing from a very particular position of trans* subjectivity though, framing their analysis of Chaplin in terms of their own recovery from top surgery and the way the silent star’s films “gave image to both the changes I yearned for and those I joyfully experienced” (2022: 175), I myself am writing as a cisgendered spectator of Tootsie. I have therefore tried to carefully follow Jacob Hale’s “Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals writing about Transsexuals” (1997), which though originally written almost 20 years ago is still in many ways a powerful guide for cisgender theorists. In particular, Hale’s advice to “approach your topic with a sense of humility,” “interrogate your own subject position,” and remember that “transsexual lives are lived, hence livable” (1997) have been at the forefront of my mind while carrying out my textual analysis of the film. I am aware that it is not my place to identify what about transness Tootsie is depicting, if a trans* viewer would even agree with me at all on that point, and so I offer this analysis and my broader thesis as a set of questions or provocations designed to suggest one way of engaging with the film as a productive, potentially radical and exciting text. Despite my own cisgender subject position, on every viewing of Tootsie I find it impossible to place it alongside other cross-dressing films without sensing that there is something different going on within the layers of Hoffman’s performance.
11The first of the film’s reveal scenes is set in the Russian Tea Room, a New York restaurant where Dorothy deliberately runs into her agent George and reveals her identity to him. The scene can be broken down into five main “beats”. This terminology is taken from the performance theorist Konstantin Stanislavski, and as Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke summarise in Reframing Screen Performance, refers to “discrete units of action” which “serve as the building blocks for story and scenes” (2008: 210). A new beat “begins whenever the strategy of taking action or the action itself shifts” (2008: 210), and I break down the Russian Tea Room scene like so: beat one: Dorothy accosts George outside of the restaurant; beat two: Dorothy follows George and sits down at his table, flirting with him to his discomfort; beat three: Dorothy reveals their normative identity as Michael to George’s surprise; beat four: George’s associates Joel and Phil come over to the table; beat five: Dorothy demands George loan him money for some new outfits. Stanislavski believed that breaking scenes down in such a way would help actors to “discover the structural dynamics that undergird their future performance” (Baron and Carnicke, 2008: 210), and Baron and Carnicke demonstrate how this theory can be similarly utilised within film analysis to more closely understand the varying rhythms and shifts of an actor’s performance. Focusing on the opening three beats of this scene, I propose that Hoffman’s performance is marked by a frantic, thrilling energy which fluctuates continually in intensity, engaging me as a spectator and suggesting the exciting possibilities that come with “the indefinite period or moment in suspension from the gridded paradigm” (Steinbock, 2019: 12).
12In beat one, Dorothy stops George outside the restaurant to ask “I wonder if you can help me? I’m looking for the Russian Tea Room?” George replies “this is the Russian Tea Room, right here. You’re standing in front of it.” Dorothy responds “Oh, well, my stars, so it is. Well this is very embarrassing!” Although it is a brief opening exchange, there are several prominent features of Hoffman’s performance as Dorothy that are immediately noticeable. When delivering these lines, Hoffman sharply enunciates each word and uses sudden increases in pitch to place further emphasis on certain words. For example, in the opening line of the scene, the word “wonder” is accompanied by a sharp rise in pitch, Hoffman’s voice then gradually descending until “me?” which is met again with a sudden jump in pitch. This intense vocal delivery occurs throughout the film and can be more precisely defined as a creative use of prosody. The sound theorist David Sonnenschein has written extensively on the emotive power of prosody and how these “tonal inflections are as important to transmit the message as the symbolic meaning of the words” (2001: 138). Hoffman’s unpredictable vocal shifts when playing Dorothy have a major impact on the delivery of these lines and thus demonstrates how vocal intonations influence the shape and meaning of the dialogue.
13This energetic vocal performance is mirrored in Dorothy’s physical movements, which are similarly marked by a sense of constant frantic motion. As Dorothy and George run into each other outside the restaurant, Hoffman raises their hand firmly in a halting motion before quickly pulling their hand back so it hovers just above their chest, a gesture which is repeated throughout the film and becomes a key part of Dorothy’s body language. As George replies that “this is the Russian Tea Room, right here,” Hoffman twitches their head rapidly to convey their surprise. Responding with “well this is very embarrassing,” Hoffman again raises their hand to hover above their chest and continues to twitch their head rapidly. These constant movements that display Hoffman’s expressive physical range serves to further enhance their energetic vocal delivery, resulting in an overall performance that is marked by a palpable sense of constant flickering energy. Dorothy’s clothing and their various accessories serves to further enhance the liveliness of their screen presence, the large, elaborate hairpiece making the character’s head shakes all the more noticeable while their dangling earrings and various rings and bracelets constantly quiver and glimmer. As James Naremore writes in Acting in the Cinema, “when a costume is laden with accessories… the opportunities for gesture are considerably enhanced” (1988: 89), and thus the energetic thrill of Dorothy’s presence is maximised.
14In beat one, Hoffman’s performance as Dorothy is therefore characterised by a dynamic, unpredictable energy both vocal and gestural in nature. As the scene moves into beats two and three, this liveliness to me takes on a trans* energy as the identity of Michael is introduced to the mix. The affective capacities of the voice are crucial to these beats and to communicating the sensation of trans* inbetweenness which I propose can be felt somewhere within Hoffman’s performance.
15In beat two, George takes his seat inside the restaurant but is joined, to his surprise, by Dorothy. Sitting down at the table, she says “Hi, I’m new in town and I’m awfully lonely. I wondered if you wouldn’t mind buying me lunch?” The uneven prosody of Hoffman’s vocal performance is even more dramatic here in its fluctuations, the actor pitching their voice up repeatedly on the words “hi,” “awfully lonely,” “mind” and “lunch?” Hoffman also adds a drawn-out twang to extend their delivery of the word “aw-fully,” which both fits within the character’s strong Southern accent while also further complicating the rhythm of the delivery. Hoffman’s physical gestures are also again marked by an intense energy, the actor shaking their head vigorously to further emphasise “aw-fully” while brusquely clasping their hands together. As George stands up to try and have Dorothy removed from the table, she reaches out quickly to jab him from behind, drawing from him a sharp yell of pain. Dorothy quickly tells him “it’s okay, it’s okay, George, George, George, George, George, it’s Michael Dorsey okay? Your favourite client. How are you? Last time you got me a job it was a tomato.” Each delivery of “George” alternates between the precise enunciation and high-pitched delivery of Dorothy and a markedly deeper-toned register. In a narrative context this exaggeratedly deep pitch is used to signify the normative voice of Michael in a subtle, understated manner so as not attract the attention of the other diners in the restaurant. However, what instead strikes me here is quite how remarkably low Hoffman drops his voice. The words “it’s Michael Dorsey” signals the reveal of the character’s normative identity to George, but this surprisingly deep voice overpowers the blunt meaning of the words. Crucial to this is also the speed of the delivery of “George, George, George, George, George,” Hoffman again displaying his expressive skills by repeatedly dropping and raising the pitch and loosening and sharpening the enunciation of each “George.” What results from this is a moment of intense fluctuation, which is further enhanced by the actor’s facial shifts. Delivering the line “it’s Michael Dorsey, okay?” in the deep register voice, Hoffman keeps his lips tight and holds his face tense, using, to borrow from performance theorist Robert Cohen’s terminology, “threat tactics” to dominate the exchange (2013: 82). However, on the line “how are you?” which is delivered in Dorothy’s voice, Hoffman quickly pulls their lips back to reveal a broad smile. This sudden shift to Cohen’s “inducing tactics,” used to “draw others into his or her confidence” (2013: 83), is emphasised by Hoffman holding the rest of their body entirely still, hands tightly clasped together and back arched forward, directing my entire focus to the character’s rapid vocal and facial changes. When considered all together, in this moment of major performative dexterity, my perception of Dorothy’s body undergoes the process of “forming and differing” that Steinbock sees cinema as capable of communicating (2019: 3).
16A closer examination of the affective capacities of the voice will help to elucidate exactly what I experience as a spectator in this moment of fluctuation. I follow the strand of affect theory first developed by Baruch Spinoza and later advanced by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari which defines affect as a pre-emotive “passion” which is rooted within the corporeal body (Spinoza, 1994: 154, emphasis in original). Deleuze and Guattari especially emphasise that affect exists in an interrelationship between bodies, concluding that “we know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body” (2005 [1980]: 257). This relationship between bodies, in this case between the body of Hoffman as performer and me as spectator, and the ways in which each can affect the other, is key in emphasising how a spectator’s experience of such a scene at the time of the film’s release could so radically differ from my own today.
17Deleuze and Guattari argue that art is a key site of affective possibilities, composed as a “bloc of sensations, that is to say, a compound of percepts and affects” (1994 [1991]: 164, emphasis in original). They further pinpoint the use of sound within art as capable of affective sensations, writing that “harmonies are affects” and “consonance and dissonance, harmonies of tone or color, are affects of music or painting” (1994 [1991]: 164). The moment that I highlighted earlier, in which the unexpectedly deep voice that Hoffman drops to overpowers the meaning of the words he delivers, is a particularly powerful example of an affective moment that works on a pre-emotive, non-linguistic level, a level which for me is only further intensified by the subsequent fluctuations between the identities of Michael and Dorothy. Using the Sonic Visualiser software to capture through image the visceral qualities of the voice, Melanie Strumbl concludes in a study titled “Voice, Affect, Grain” that voices marked by significant “vibrations or intensities” can “possess an affective capacity that ‘moves’ the listener” and “by taking the sound’s resonant vibration and articulatory muscularity, our own bodies become understanding” (2018: 220–221). Her use of the term “grain” originates from Roland Barthes’ study of the voice, where he similarly concludes that certain voices communicate to him an “individual thrill” (1977: 181). Using the example of a Russian bass singer, Barthes finds that “something is there, manifest and stubborn… beyond (or before) the meaning of the words” (1977: 181). He goes on to define this “something” as being “the cantor’s body, brought to your ears in one and the same movement from deep down in the cavities” (1977: 181).
18What is carried to me here in these moments of rapid yo-yoing back and forth between Dorothy and Michael is the in-between state in which this character’s body exists, turning Hoffman’s energetic vocal performance into a thrilling exploration of the possibilities of non-binary identity. I’m cautious here about overstating this moment and am again aware of my cisgendered, and thus limited, perspective on this scene’s trans* potentialities and the many different ways in which such a moment could be experienced, but it is hard to deny that the energetic nature of Hoffman’s performance places the film at a notable distance from other cross-dressing films and their restrictive, exploitative reveal sequences. In Andrew Anastasia’s essay on the trans* voice, which he is clear in delineating from the “more metaphorical effort to ‘claim our voice,’” he argues for the value of listening “to the voice qua voice—not merely as the message” (2014: 262). Discussing the “affective register” of the voice and the way it “can pierce us in unexpected ways” (2014: 262), Anastasia concludes that the challenging nature of the trans* voice, its position “somewhere between male and female” and as if “belonging to another world,” serves as a “powerful instance of nondiscursive ways to trouble and blur normative assumptions about sex and gender” (2014: 263). He suggests that we can find much value in the way “trans* voices can fail to make sense in spectacular ways” and that “in those spectacular failures, our ghostly utterances, we find the forms of resistance that beckon from the future of transgender studies” (2014: 263). This idea of the provocativeness of the trans* voice speaks in some way to my experience of Hoffman’s vocal fluctuations, which affect me in a manner that could perhaps best be described as a shimmer. It is not my place of course to speculate on the affective nature of trans* experience but, as Steinbock viscerally describes it, “I make my way across the water that shimmers with heat rising” (2019: 8). The provocations of the trans* voice recalls and develops Keegan’s argument for Tootsie as a “bad” object that refuses to assimilate transness into binary structures, and it is this “spectacular failure” of the voice which disrupts the destination of the reveal scene and instead expands it to offer fresh possibilities of exploring the trans* journey.
19The second reveal scene that occurs towards the end of Tootsie further speaks to me as a moment of non-binary possibility. Towards the end of the film, Southwest General, the soap opera in which Dorothy stars as the character Emily Kimberly, is forced to shoot an episode live due to technical problems. Dorothy uses this opportunity to reveal their normative identity as Michael to both the entire cast and crew and simultaneously to the TV audience. The scene is constructed around a monologue given by Dorothy in character as Emily as she descends down an elaborate staircase. She quickly breaks away from the dialogue on the teleprompter to begin her own speech, and here the prosody of Hoffman’s delivery grows even more unpredictable than before. Improvising an elaborate story about the background of their character, there is the sudden introduction of a stutter on the line “in fact she was so terrified that she would uh that-that-that-that-that the baby daughter would bear the stigma of illegitimacy.” This faltering moment of vocal disturbance further adds to the energy of Hoffman’s performance, and is again encountered a moment later in the line “he would follow in her footsteps and-and-and-and-and-and-and-and-and just-just-just-just-just-just-just-just-just owe it all up to her.” As Dorothy stutters through this line, illustrating the haphazardly improvised nature of the speech, each repetition of “just” increases in pitch, emphasis, and speed until the last repetition which is delivered with a sense of release, followed up by a sharp voice crack on “all.” This feeling of stuttering energy that culminates in a big release is further communicated by Hoffman’s physical gestures in this moment, the actor nervously twisting their body from left to right while frantically gesticulating with their hands as if attempting to grasp the words out of thin air. The acting coach François Delsarte wrote extensively on “gesture” as being “the direct agent of the heart” and constructed an elaborate study of how individual gestures could communicate “specific emotional states” (1949: 192). Baron and Carnicke demonstrate in Reframing Screen Performance how this attentiveness to the emotional meaning of specific gestures can enhance understandings of film performance (2008), and Hoffman’s impressive bodily control here manages to convey a sense of pent-up energy that is released both vocally and gesturally, the actor punching the air with a clenched fist upon the last repetition of “just.”
20Upon reaching the bottom of the staircase, Dorothy removes her glasses, fake eyelashes, and wig and says “for I am not Emily Kimberly, the daughter of Dwayne and Almer Kimberley. No I’m not. I’m Edward Kimberley, the recluse brother of my sister Anthea.” On this last line, Hoffman drops his voice to an exaggeratedly low register similar to that of the Tea Room scene. The removal of Dorothy’s various accessories and the transition to a deeper male-coded voice aligns the moment within the conventions of the reveal trope, but in this moment it is not Michael that is revealed but the new identity of Edward Kimberly who speaks with a striking deep quality to his voice. Returning to my discussion of the affective qualities of the voice, I find in this moment that Hoffman’s voice carries similar qualities to those vocal sounds which give Barthes an “individual thrill” (1977: 181) through their grain and here I am made distinctly aware of my connection to the performer’s corporeal body. In their writing on the power of sound, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the impact a “sonorous bloc” can have on the body (2005 [1980]: 176). I find that it is here, in this final vocal shift into the deep grain of Edward’s voice, that the various elements of Hoffman’s vocal performance throughout the scene accumulate into one such sonorous bloc, constructing an affective linkage between the body of the performer and my body as spectator. As in the Tea Room scene, it is of pivotal importance that this affective moment occurs as the various gender identities of the character coalesce and are traversed between, creating an “ongoing event of differential becomings” (Steinbock, 2019: 4) that offers me as spectator to “make my way across the water that shimmers with heat rising” (2019: 8). This scene on the set of Southwest General sees Hoffman exploring the identities of Dorothy, Emily, Edward, and Michael in what appears to me to be an evocative shimmering moment, and the critic Frank P. Tomasulo similarly observes in his essay on Tootsie that the film “carries at least the possibility of exposing a liminal moment, with the human body acting as the threshold of that slippery (and subversive) sense of a mutable self” (1996: 7).
21The importance of this liminal shimmering sensation that undermines the restrictive disclosure of the reveal trope is also addressed within the film’s closing scene. The romantic plot hinges on Michael’s infatuation with his Southwest General castmate Julie (Jessica Lange), who only knows him on-set as Dorothy. Upon revealing his normative identity, Julie feels betrayed, punches Michael, and walks off the set. In the final scene, Michael tracks down Julie as she is leaving the production studio, apologises to her on the street, and they walk off together reunited. Keegan argues that in this scene the “transfeminist potential of Dorothy lingers as an expanded and yet lost set of possibilities,” emphasising the contrast between the liberating empowerment of “Dorothy’s integration of masculine assertion and feminine care” and the “limited horizon of the cisgender heterosexual couple, undermining the genre’s typical narrative conclusion” (2022: 30). I take issue however with Keegan’s judgement that the challenges Dorothy poses to binary identity are ultimately lost, and by looking at the dialogue from this scene suggest that the character’s trans* possibilities actually remain. Julie tells Michael “I miss Dorothy” and he replies “you don’t have to. She’s right here. And she misses you. Look, you don’t know me from Adam, but I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man.” Within this deliberately complex statement lies a trace of Hoffman’s traversal of the body, the over-complicated phrasing of “I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man” demonstrating that in some way the character’s exploration of their bodily identity has left a permanent impact. For me as spectator, this impact lies in the sensation of the shimmer, Deleuze and Guattari writing of affective experience that “even if the material lasts for only a few seconds it will give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself in the eternity” (2005 [1980]: 166, emphasis in original). Such are the intensities of Hoffman’s performance that the shimmer still remains for me in some manner, despite the cisnormative closing events of the narrative.
22In On The Necessity of Bad Trans Objects, Keegan locates the power of “bad” objects in their containing of “the presence of something unclassifiable within the established categories used to delimit sex and gender” (2022: 29). This unclassifiable something is for me rooted within Hoffman’s remarkably dynamic performance which carries the film’s reveal scenes away from the destination and into exploring the journey instead. Steinbock’s argument for the ability of cinema to bring about “novel transversals of sensory perception” (2019: 3) is in my experience realised in one particular form through the affective fluctuations of the actor’s energetic probing of bodily identity. The rapid yo-yoing that defines Hoffman’s performance within these scenes serves to distance the film from other cross-dressing films by offering certain resonances with the discourses that the trans* label has generated within recent years. There are certainly connections that can be made between Tootsie and other cross-dressing films that I have not touched upon, for example the linkages between Jewishness and trans* identity in Tootsie and Yentl, both films starring prominent Jewish actors and speaking to a long history of Jewish adaptation and assimilation. But Tootsie’s affective moments are, for me as a spectator, remarkably unique to itself, and while Keegan concludes in his defense of the film that we must “return to the trans abject” (2022: 29), I argue that we must feel it as well.