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The present article inquires how teenage girls in the 1910s United States used cinema to establish a fundamental language of female homoeroticism, gender nonconformity, and kinship by critically interrogating Diana W. Anselmo's 'A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood' (2023). Anselmo does not attempt to read the films themselves, for she provides a riveting and fascinating account that critically looks into the early film fandom and the queerness imbibed within it. Anselmo's work captures the fan ephemera that emerged around the female actors of the silent film era, examining the diaries, letters, and scrapbooks of young girl fans. Anselmo's text is an exceptional feat in archival research and film history that makes a valid argument for inclusion in film studies, audience reception, and fan studies courses going forward for the way it sets up the historical precedents of modern fan communities and fan reception. Moreover, while adolescent teen girls have historically held a problematic position within the discourses of fan studies and audience reception that tend to view them as excessively emotional, Anselmo's work sought to give agency and recognition to their contributions to shaping film fandom and star system in Hollywood.
Saha et al. (Thu,) studied this question.