A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (Volume 4) (Feminist Media Histories)

"Gathering an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, & photographs, A Queer Way of Feeling explores how, in the 1910s, girls coming of age in the United States used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, & kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos on personal scrapbooks & making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, adolescent girls from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of mental states, actions, & proclivities self-described as "queer" or "different from the norm." Material testimonies of a forgotten audience, these autobiographical artifacts show how early movie-loving girls engendered terminologies, communities, & creative practices that would become cornerstones of media fan reception & queer belonging"°°° Diana W. Anselmo is a feminist film historian & queer immigrant. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Screen, Camera Obscura, Film History, JCMS: the Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, & Journal of Women’s History. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, & the International Association for Media & History, among others. She is the author of A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023). "Gathering an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs, A Queer Way of Feeling explores how, in the 1910s, girls coming of age in the United States used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos on personal scrapbooks and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, adolescent girls from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of mental states, actions, and proclivities self-described as "queer" or "different from the norm." Material testimonies of a forgotten audience, these autobiographical artifacts show how early movie-loving girls engendered terminologies, communities, and creative practices that would become cornerstones of media fan reception and queer belonging"-- Provided by publisher 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.