Michael Dorsey is a male failure who
becomes a female success. Playing
Dorothy is an ego trip.
This
success comes primarily, the film suggests, from the masculine power disguised and
veiled by the feminine costume. Physical gestures of masculinity provide Tootsie’s comic motif of female
impersonation. Dorothy Michaels drops
her voice to call a cab, lifts heavy suitcases, and shoves a hefty competitor
out of the way. Dorothy’s “feminist”
speeches too are less a response to the oppression of women than an instinctive
situational male reaction to being treated like a woman. The implication is that women must be taught
by men to win their rights.
In
this respect, Tootsie’s
cross-dressing is a way of promoting the notion of masculine power while
masking it. In psychoanalytic theory,
the male transvestite is not a powerless man; according to psychiatrist Robert Stoller, in Sex and
Gender, he is a “phallic woman,” who can tell himself that “he is, or with
practice will become, a better woman than a biological female if he chooses to
do so.”…Dorothy’s effectiveness is the literal equivalent of speaking softly
and carrying a big stick….Tootsie
does, in fact, have a message for women, although not the one the filmmakers
intended. It says that feminist ideas
are much less threatening when they come from a man.
Elaine
Showalter, “Critical Cross-Dressing: Male Feminists and the Woman of the Year,”
The appearance of this anthology may
disturb some readers who worry that “gender studies” could be a pallid
assimilation of feminist criticism into the mainstream (or male stream) of
English studies, a return to the old priorities and binary oppositions that
will reinstate familiar male canons while crowding hard-won courses on women
writers out of the curriculum. Others
fear that talking about gender is a way for both male and female critics to avoid the
political commitment of feminism. Still
others raise the troubling possibility that gender will be isolated from issues
of class and race. These are serious
questions that must continue to concern us. But gender theory can be a
significant and radical expansion of our work; the turn to gender, as June
Howard points out, “need not be depoliticizing.
Its consequences depend on what we choose to do, on the kind of theory
and the kind of critical community we build.”
Elaine Showalter, “The Rise of Gender,”
in Speaking of Gender, ed. Showalter
(Routledge, 1999)