The labour of girlhood innocence: Shirley Temple, Hu Rongrong, and the genealogy of child stardom in 1930s trans-pacific visual culture

Child stars are both children and cross-cultural visual figures whose identities are shaped by the film industry. From a trans-Pacific perspective, this study compares two representative female child stars from the 1930s: Shirley Temple in the United States and Hu Rongrong in China. By focusing on these two highly interconnected figures, it asks how girlhood innocence is gendered in different industrial contexts, how it is transformed by visual media into an emotional resource for adult audiences, and how it becomes a transpacific consumable cultural product. The article argues that girlhood innocence shown in cinema is not an inherent quality, but a gendered performance produced through cinematic visual representation and consumer culture. In the United States, within the context of the Hollywood studio system, Temple is valued for providing emotional reassurance through “cuteness” and innocence. In China, within Shanghai’s semi-colonial film industry, Hu Rongrong reproduces “the Temple model” and embodies the public desire for urban modernity. Through a close visual and contextual comparison, this study further interrogates the moral ambivalence surrounding female child stars, particularly regarding their emotional labour and the inadequate protections afforded to them, issues that continue to resonate in contemporary forms of children’s exposure on media platforms.