Abstract
Diana W. Anselmo's A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood makes some major scholarly contributions to cinema and media studies and gender and sexuality studies. Refusing film history's tendency to use 1917 as a punctuation point, the book examines personal materials, including scrapbooks, fan mail to stars and other fans, illustrated diaries, collages, poems, and amateur photographs, produced by moviegoing adolescent girls of the 1910s, and sometimes by stars too, to place adolescent female queerness, gender nonconformity, intimacies, and solidarities at the heart of both Hollywood's star system and of early film history. Anselmo's queer, feminist “affective historiography” is centered on a pulsating body of ephemera that she describes as a “patchworked feminist archive” dispersed across “the unstable emporium of virtual information that is the internet,” “grassroots archives,” “memorabilia stored at women's colleges, university libraries, and sundry nonprofit repositories,” film archives, and “one-of-a-kind fan artifacts from the 1910s” (20). By the 1920s, however, the scrapbook had been standardised into “an industry-sanctioned commodity” designed to manage the desires and longings that in the prior decade had run riot at and around the movies.
Anselmo acknowledges the constraints that her research objects revealed in the book's introductory chapter, noting that in spite of “surveying girls from a variety of means, creeds, and localities,” she “rarely came across girls who identified as anything but white, of US birth, or of European descent” (12). This fact, Anselmo suggests, reflects the film magazines’ presumption of both universal whiteness and literacy. There is some acknowledged tension in the book between the participatory and inventive queer adolescent world-making of the fans who leave their traces in these private archives, and the scarcity of sources representing the desires and imaginative and communal acts of “[y]oung people of color, the very poor, foreign-born, or illiterate” (13). In the early pages of the book, Anselmo delineates a number of “significant sites of research” that remain urgent, but for which the materials she found proved to be of no use, and she highlights the presence of “the audiences still unaccounted for in early Hollywood histories” (13).
The book embraces the impermanence and incompleteness of its ephemeral objects, which places it in dialogue with Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon's Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film (2022)—full disclosure: I am a contributor to that volume—and in a continuum with a long, multidisciplinary history of queer and feminist reflection on the informal archives and historiographic adaptations needed to write the histories of people whose stories and lives have been actively marginalised or erased by institutions of memory. Anselmo generously maps the scholarly genealogies out of which her own project grows, recognizing this book's imbrication with scholarship on queer female intimacy, spectatorship, consumerism, sentiment, stardom, masculinity, archives, and pastimes. One of the many pleasurable aspects of this book is its adept and continuous critical engagement of these rich and complex genealogies, as when, for example, Anselmo reflects on how studies of relationships among women by scholars such as Martha Vicinus and Sharon Marcus take on particular dimensions when considered in a medium-specific context. Anselmo observes, “Because movie spectatorship, fandom, and stardom are predicated on desire held in abeyance—on autoeroticism, projection, imagination, and distance—using physical contact to validate homoerotic spectatorial investment is moot” (31). This observation allows Anselmo to discover how scrapbookers’ convey and embody the physicality of their desires and intimacies, through the use of eyewitness accounts and amateur Kodak images taken by fans that make indexical claims on the star's real presence; through the adoption of a shared “slanguage” (57); through tactile manipulations and relocations of images; and through the physical inhabitation of the image-papered bedroom or actress's dressing room as a kind of “three-dimensional scrapbook” where star and fans could meet (127, 71). Fans write their bodies not only into their journals and letters to stars, but also into their correspondences with each other. After 15-year old Edna G. Vercoe from Highland Park, Illinois, hammers her thumb while trying to mount an image of Crane Wilbur on her wall, her classmate, Florence Schreiber, urges Vercoe to “please write & tell him about your pounding finger. If you don’t, I will” (120). Though much of the book's attention is given to girl fans’ relationship to stars at the peak of their careers, Anselmo also pays tender attention to the moving relationship between fans and “has-been” stars such as Florence Turner, whose career was short-lived and who ended her life by suicide at 52 years old, citing Turner's comment in a 1924 press interview, “No, I don’t believe the public is fickle—I know it isn’t… How do I know? How does any of us know? By the fan letters, of course” (88). Such sections make space for considering multigenerational female intimacies and for objects of desire outside of frameworks of success, while also calling for more attention to be paid to “the negative side of early film celebrity, palled by the ruthlessly swift demands of the medium, as by the undiscussed toll moviemaking took on pioneer actors’ bodies and minds” (89).
Grounded always in the specificity of the ephemera she studies while thinking across the wide range of scholarly discourses that have addressed female queerness and gender nonconformity, Anselmo recalibrates available periodizations and narratives of queer adolescent efforts to vocalise “nonnormative subjectivities” and “an affinity for difference,” an affinity that manifests itself in complicated and idiosyncratic ways, by thinking within the context of the communally-devised “functional language of affective media reception” (32–33).
For example, in Chapter 5, Anselmo argues that the “movie-illustrated diary” of Helen Edna Davis, a white, first-generation immigrant from South Africa who attended Smith College, provides evidence that “educated girls growing up in the 1910s were well aware of psychoanalytic debates on female interiority” (148). The window that these diaries provide onto queer adolescent girls’ perception of emerging clinical discourses is fascinating in its own right. The diaries are at once moving, as we read about the “bitter medicine” Davis must accept after her breakdown at college, and funny, as when Davis quips, “poor old Psychology!” (148).
Davis's diary's illustrated movie reviews mediate reflections on her formal education, medical treatment, and sexual desires, and, Anselmo argues, such material allows “a significant historiographical reframing, because it changes our contextual understanding of early female film audiences” (154). Building on José Esteban Muñoz's work, Anselmo shows how the queer girl fans’ acts of “scissoring” and collaging “[circumvent] press discourse chastising or heteronormalizing” of cross-dressing or queer stars” (180–181). Such acts represent, for Anselmo, more durable and sharable forms of world-making that perpetuate the otherwise fleeting imaginal possibilities that movies and film ephemera made available to adolescent girls. The documents also provide an important early example of multimodal, embodied writing about the film experience. Through these idiosyncratically-created personal archives, authors demonstrate awareness of gender as a performance, a performance articulated in dialogue with movies, ephemera, and other movie-going girls. The film scrapbook is just “one venue where these queer fan responses can be rehearsed” (177). As authors create their own paper-cut outs that function almost as puppets, fans emerge, in the course of Anselmo's narrative, not just as spectators, but, through their imaginative acts, as producers too. By attending to their productions, Anselmo, like the Women Film Pioneers Project (https://wfpp.columbia.edu), brings into view some of the many creative practices of women in the film industry that have been largely swept to the margins by textbooks, institutionalised film histories, and myths of exclusively singular and male creative acts. For example, Anselmo argues that fourteen-year-old Margaret Harroun's crayoned make-overs of young stars’ images not only reveal “the scrapbooker's longing for animating her idol,” but also bring into consciousness “early film manufacturing's uncredited reliance on women's manual and creative labor—in the home, but also in the studio, specifically when it came to film editing, individual frame coloring, and color tinting” (123).
Anselmo marshals compelling evidence to posit queer adolescent female movie fans of the 1910s not as fans who queered the norms of fandom, but rather as the agents who invented and designed the forms that media fandom per se took and continues to take today. As she writes, “Once fan and trade magazines selected adolescent girls as the personification of emotional movie consumption, they endowed girls from all walks of life with a rare authorial agency: the opportunity to delineate foundational practices of female fandom, including an epistolary dialect bursting with female desire and intimacy” (30–31). A Queer Way of Feeling is unabashed in its celebration of these adolescent queer fans who play such a vital role in the early film landscape, a celebration that resounds particularly loudly in a U.S. landscape groaning under the weight of anti-LGBTQ+ bills that especially target young people. One of the book's many strengths lies in its ability to develop a strong, carefully-researched line of argument without losing the playfulness, pleasure, desires, refusals, and intimacies that suffuse these ephemeral materials. The book revels in the attitude of these queer girl fans, who emerge as unapologetically joyful and desiring, full of intention and agency. Anselmo makes lots of space within the book for attending to the way these fans write. Like Anselmo herself, they write with “gusto,” “brio,” intelligence, body, humour, determination, and a powerful “sense of belonging, of gregariousness and peer inclusion,” at least within the demographic group that had access to, and was able to make a world for itself out of, early Hollywood film culture (197).
“It is important to recall,” Anselmo writes, “that these original moviegoing girls labored with their hands and loved the pictures with their whole body while in the throes of adolescence. The personal archives film historians encounter today are the spoils of these fans’ exploits—they are a concrete collection of life fragments, of fleeting attractions, not unlike the film ephemera that form them. Scrapbooks are what survived after the body did not” (144). These practices persist, Anselmo suggest, in “fan fiction, virtual journaling, digital scrapbooks, and fan art circulated in online communities, with female fans excerpting licensed images from mainstream media and repurposing them as loci of same-sex desire, gender nonconformity, and divergent fantasy in self-authored reception materials” (144). This important insight illuminates the strong and vital connections that exist between queer feminist early film writing in the past and present and the contemporary discourse of media studies, opening a different avenue through which to understand the “and” of Cinema and Media Studies.
The book calls cinema and media historians to pay more attention to these early movie-going queer, female adolescents, and to recognise their formative role not in queering fandom, but in inventing it as the participatory, queer, sensory, and world-building range of practices that persist into the present. Queer spectatorship, Anselmo shows, resides not, or at least not only, in a particular star such as Rudolph Valentino, but in the bodies and minds of the moviegoers. In the book's conclusion, Anselmo makes clear the ambition of her project, declaring that these ephemeral materials require the field to rethink some of its dominant narratives. “It is urgent,” she concludes, “to reintegrate young female fans in our histories of media technology, a male-dominated canon from which they have been systematically sidelined. Leading media scholar Henry Jenkins, for example, speaks of white, male, middle-class youth as the ‘early settlers and first inhabitants’ of ‘convergence culture’… But as the materials in this book have attested, working and middle-class girls growing up during the early twentieth century were among the first media consumers to employ many of the reception practices Jenkins readily attributes to white men of privilege” (213–214). We have our work cut out for us.
