Named one of the top 100 American Films by the American Film Institute, Tootsie was released in 1982, and became the year's blockbuster romantic comedy. The 1980s saw the opening of several films featuring cross-dressing, including Yentl, Victor/Victoria, and Torch Song Trilogy; and yet it was Tootsie that garnered the most critical attention and popular acclaim. The American cultural obsession with cross-dressing surfaces in newspaper stories, television talk shows, children's tales, and movies. Anthropologists, literary critics, and historians all have paid a great deal of attention to cross-dressing, producing studies of hermaphrodites, boy actors, and the politics of camp. Cross-dressing and the treatment of cross-dressing raises, in a relatively concise if somewhat confusing fashion, questions of the construction of gender and sexuality. If a man can dress up successfully as a woman, does that mean that gender itself is merely a performance, albeit a culturally dictated one? What does...