A Queer Way of Feeling

A Queer Way of Feeling gathers an unexplored archive of fan-made scrapbooks, letters, diaries, and photographs to explore how girls coming of age in the United States in the 1910s used cinema to forge a foundational language of female nonconformity, intimacy, and kinship. Pasting cross-dressed photos into personal scrapbooks and making love to movie actresses in epistolary writing, girl fans from all walks of life stitched together established homoerotic conventions with an emergent syntax of film stardom to make sense of feeling "queer" or "different from the norm." These material testimonies show how a forgotten audience engendered terminologies, communities, and creative practices that became cornerstones of media fan reception and queer belonging.

Auteur

Diana W. Anselmo is a feminist film historian and a queer immigrant. Her work has been featured in a number of journals, including Screen, Camera Obscura, Film History, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Journal of Women's History. Her research has received support from the Fulbright/Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, and the International Association for Media and History, among others.