A Queer Way of Feeling – Girl Fans and Personal Archives in Early Hollywood: Feminist Media Histories

"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