
A Queer Way of Feeling
Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood
Diana W. Anselmo(Author)
University of California Press
1st Edition
Published on 7. February 2023
Book
Hardback
280 pages
978-0-520-29964-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
"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 *More details
Series
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
30 b-w illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
544 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-29964-1 (9780520299641)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
02/2023
1st Edition
Naval Institute Press
€29.49
Available for download
Person
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.
Content
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
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