A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood

by Diana W. Anselmo

Overview

A Queer Way of Feeling gathers an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs to explore how girls coming of age in the United States in the 1910s used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos into personal scrapbooks and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, girl fans from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of feeling "queer" or "different from the norm." These material testimonies show how a forgotten audience engendered terminologies, communities, and creative practices that became cornerstones of media fan reception and queer belonging.

 
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520971295
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Series:	Feminist Media Histories , #4
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	280
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Diana W. Anselmo is a feminist film historian and a queer immigrant. Her work has been featured in a number of journals, including Screen, Camera Obscura, Film History, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Journal of Women's History. Her research has received support from the Fulbright/Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, and the International Association for Media and History, among others.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Girl, Fan, Queer: Female Film Reception in the 1910s

1. It Disquiets, It Delights: Same-Sex Attachments and Early Female Moviegoing 
2. “Dear Flo”: Homoerotic Desire and Queer Identification in Private Fan Mail
3. “If I Were a Man”: Gender-Bending in Girls’ Published Fan Poems 
4. Girls, Pick Up Your Scissors: The Queer Makings of the “Movie Scrap Book” Fad 
5. Different from Others: Movie-Illustrated Diaries, Cross-Dressing, and Circulated 
Discourses on Female Deviance
6. A Coding of Queer Delights: Gender Nonconformity in Girls’ Movie Scrapbooks 
Epilogue: One of Us: The Corporatization of Female Fan Love and Labor

Notes 
Illustration Credits 
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The book calls cinema and media historians to pay more attention to these early movie-going queer, female adolescents, and to recognize their formative role not in queering fandom, but in inventing it as the participatory, queer, sensory, and worldbuilding range of practices that persist into the present."

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film