A Queer Way of Feeling

"Finally, a history of 'girl fans' that queers their passionate investment in the silent film era's 'girl stars.' Diana Anselmo's exhaustive and creative research teases out in glorious detail how these young women found a means to resist normative expectations of femininity and license their desires for same-sex intimacy through their admiration of the actresses of early Hollywood."--Hilary A. Hallett, author of Inventing the It Girl: How Elinor Glyn Created the Modern Romance and Conquered Early Hollywood "Much work, both theoretical and historical, has been conducted to document the experiences of early film audiences, but no sustained approach of basing such a history principally on the personal correspondence, creative writing, and scrapbooks of early movie fans has yet been accomplished . . . until now. Anselmo brilliantly guides us through an astonishing array of nonnormative reception practices innovated and memorialized by a generation of adolescent girls and young women during Hollywood's first decade of emergence. A Queer Way of Feeling is both an open love letter to this generation and a radical act of remembrance that convincingly insists that their ardent pursuit of movie fandom's queer possibilities can no longer be denied or ignored."--Mark Lynn Anderson, author of Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America "A rich and very valuable book. Anselmo does a fantastic job of melding American cultural history, gender and sexuality studies, film history, and medical and psychological research literature, bringing the work to a level that few film scholars attempt. The extraordinary level of this work raises the bar for future feminist film history and historical film reception studies."--Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, author of At the Picture Show: Small-Town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture