Young female fans in the 1910s played a significant role in shaping Hollywood cinema and celebrity culture through their personal archives and scrapbooks.
Classification of adolescent girlhood in the creation of scrapbooks is artificial and restrictive, limiting the exploration of individual experiences.
The concept of affect and its role in fan experiences and personal archives highlights the challenges of conveying and preserving emotional responses.
Deep dives
Examining the Role of Young Women in Early Hollywood
The podcast episode delves into the contribution of young women in the establishment and implementation of Hollywood cinema and celebrity culture during the 1910s. The focus is on the transition from anonymous film screenings to the emergence of recognizable stars and the impact of female adolescents on this cultural shift. By exploring personal archives and scrapbooks created by young female fans, the episode sheds light on their role in shaping Hollywood and their unique experiences as audience members. It also discusses the challenges faced in sourcing and accessing materials from diverse backgrounds, including the limitations and biases of archival collections. The episode highlights the importance of expanding traditional narratives by going beyond preserved materials and embracing the affective experiences and attachments of fans.
Navigating Artificial Classification and Constraints
The summary examines the artificial nature of classification in the context of the book's exploration of adolescent girlhood and the creation of scrapbooks. It acknowledges the challenges in defining the category of adolescent and how it evolved over time. The author reflects on their own struggle with classification and the need to create brackets and parameters while also recognizing the limitations and artificiality of rigid classifications. This section also touches on the importance of recognizing the multiple dimensions of identity, such as ethnicity and class, which might not be easily discernible from personal materials. It emphasizes the need to let go of artificial constraints and allow the artifacts to speak for themselves, going beyond prescribed categories to discover the complexities and nuances of individual experiences.
The Power of Affect and Rethinking Archives
This part of the summary delves into the concept of affect and the role it plays in the book's exploration of fan experiences and the creation of personal archives. It highlights the affective response that draws individuals to certain objects, stars, or moments and the difficult task of capturing and articulating that voltage. The author discusses the triangular relationship between the creators of personal archives, the author's own interaction with the materials, and the readers' engagement with the book. It underscores the challenges in finding language to convey affective responses and the importance of keeping the affective chain intact. The summary also challenges traditional notions of preservation and embraces the idea that the use and interaction with archival materials are essential parts of their preservation and ongoing relevance.
Exploring Nonconforming Gender Expressions in Fandom
The podcast episode discusses how young women collected images of male stars dressed in male clothing and engaged in creating physically intimate scenarios between male stars. These activities were commonly observed among young women in fandom spaces like Archive of Our Own and Tumblr. The episode highlights the presence of gender nonconforming expressions in fandom and the ways in which these expressions challenged traditional notions of fandom and gender identity.
Unearthing Fan Poems and Biographical Data
The podcast episode delves into the process of sourcing biographical information about fan poem authors and discusses its impact on the understanding of fan poems as a form. By using internet resources like Google Books and digitized school records, the host uncovers interesting details about the authors, such as their careers as published poets and non-normative personal lives. The episode showcases the challenges of relying on material culture to study time-based and body-based experiences like movie-going and crushing, while also highlighting the pleasures of discovering hidden narratives and the importance of preserving personal fan collections.
In A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023), Diana W. Anselmo queers the earliest development of the "fangirl." 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.
