Diana W. Anselmo, "A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood" (U California Press, 2023)
In\xa0A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood\xa0(University of California Press, 2023), Diana W. Anselmo queers the earliest development of the "fangirl."\xa0Gathering an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs,\xa0A Queer Way of Feeling\xa0explores 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.\nLinks Mentioned in the Episode\n\nEnglish and comparative literature professor\xa0Saidiya Hartman's website\n\nArchivist Dorothy Berry's website\n\n\ufeffHallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies