[1] A Queer Way of Feeling is an outstanding contribution to film and fan studies, a highly original and superbly written reception study focused on white queer adolescent girl fandom (ages 14–24) during the early silent film era in the United States (1910–1920). Unlike previous historians who relied primarily on discourse about girls' reception, Diana W. Anselmo centers adolescent girls' own movie memorabilia and fan production as her primary evidence of their queer reception. She argues that these materials, drawn from the girls' extant scrapbooks, diaries, and letters to stars and fan magazines, represent a "repository of vernacular of queer feeling" (18) that has gone largely unacknowledged, despite the fact that girls dominated moviegoing at this time and studios directly targeted them as their primary consumers. By giving attention to the specifics of adolescent girls' own film reception, Anselmo demonstrates how we can better understand and appreciate the way the early film industry impacted these girls’ lives, specifically the opportunities that these films and their stars offered them to "articulate feelings" (2) and "give voice to subjectivities" (32) that were broadly queer and gender nonconforming. Although fans are her main focus here, Anselmo's work also asks us to consider how their queer-inflected fandom, in turn, impacted the development of the Hollywood industry, particularly the nascent star system that was greatly shaped by their fan desires and practices.
[2] Anselmo is a recently tenured Associate Professor in Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts, California State University, Long Beach, with a PhD in Film and Media Studies. A Queer Way of Feeling is her first monograph, but it builds on several related articles that she has published in leading film and media studies journals, including Feminist Media Histories, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Screen. Since the publication of this book, Anselmo has continued to explore these same girls' film reception, focusing more on their expression of negative emotions, their "disappointment with heteronormative life and romance" (213). Anselmo represents a new generation of scholars who have come of age professionally in the era of social media, and its impact is clear throughout this book. Indeed, TWC readers may already know Anselmo's work from her 2018 article "Gender and Queer Fan Labor on Tumblr: The Case of BBC's 'Sherlock'" in Feminist Media Histories. Anselmo views her work as part of a larger genealogy of fan practices that connect these girls directly with social media fans today, arguing persuasively that "[they] devised modes of media engagement that remain integral to the functioning of online communities" (213).
[3] A Queer Way of Feeling is a substantial scholarly work—265 pages total, with seven chapters, thirty illustrations, and thirty-six pages of notes. It is expertly grounded in the relevant scholarship, particularly the feminist film history work of Shelley Stamp, Kathy Fuller Seeley, Jennifer Bean, Jackie Stacey, Hillary Hallett, Miriam Hansen, and Amelie Hastie. Stamp is one of Anselmo's mentors, and her own pioneering book about girls' reception during this era, Movie-Struck Girls (2000), is a major influence on this book. Anselmo also skillfully positions her work in relation to scholars of early cinema, feminist and queer spectatorship, fan material culture, and, more broadly, feminist, queer, medical, and psychological cultural history of the Progressive Era, particularly discourses around the New Woman, homosexuality, and adolescence. At times, Anselmo's introduction takes on aspects of a literature review, but her degree of citation is not atypical for an author's first scholarly book, and it's important to note that fan-centered work like this has historically been less encouraged and appreciated within the academy. For readers of TWC who are already invested in the importance of fan scholarship but perhaps not as familiar with Hollywood film reception history, especially in relation to women and queer people, Anselmo's thorough review of this material is an invaluable introduction.
[4] For many readers, the most insightful and pleasurable aspects of this book will be the evidence of queer girl fandom from a century ago. As Anselmo notes, doing such research is challenging since fan materials have largely not been considered worthy of preservation, especially those of girls. Her enterprising research strategies and variety of sources are therefore particularly impressive, and they offer a helpful example and guide. She was able to draw some material from the go-to Hollywood history resource, the Margaret Herrick Library in LA, and the few extant fan letter collections from the period that exist, such as those of "Biograph Girl" Florence Lawrence, one of the first movie stars (her fans are the focus of chapter 2). The bulk of Anselmo's fan materials, however, were scattered across women's colleges, universities, and municipal historical societies, mostly as scrapbooks in personal archives.
[5] In terms of sources, it is important to also acknowledge how the internet has greatly facilitated historical fan research: eBay, for example, is a great source for fan scrapbooks. In addition, historical movie fan magazines have all been digitized in the last decade, with their full text searchable online at the invaluable Media History Digital Library. This development has made locating letters to the editor and other coverage of girl fandom in the press a thousand times easier. Anselmo also cleverly draws from census and school records, Ancestry.com, and other forms of biographical data in order to learn more about her subjects and trace their later life histories. Some significant challenges remain for this research, however. Like previous studies, Anselmo's sources are predominantly white, middle-class, US-born, educated girls, the group most likely to have their lives preserved. Anselmo acknowledges this limitation, as well as the erasure of any non-white fans in the contexts and address of studio publicity and fan magazines.
[6] Anselmo's major intervention in film history here is in her focus on queer girl reception. Most film histories, including explicitly feminist histories such as Stamp's, have focused on (or presume) heterosexuality. It can seem surprising, today, to learn that scholarly histories of queer and gender nonconforming viewers, especially girls, were and are still rare (gay male reception is a more common topic). Although queer readings of Hollywood film texts have been part of film culture from the beginning, they were not acceptable subjects for scholarly work in the academy until the 1990s and were generally marginalized. Within the field of film studies, feminist scholarship was itself a specialty area of study in a field dominated by men; as Anselmo notes, feminists pioneered the historical turn in film studies in the late 1990s in order to investigate women's reception, particularly in the silent era. Some foundational lesbian-focused scholarship around industry, texts, and reception did emerge at this time, most prominently Patricia White's foundational work regarding lesbian representation and reception, Uninvited (1999). And although gender nonconformity is a popular topic today, major historical work focusing on girls and young women in this regard has also remained marginal, although Laura Horak's book about the popularity of girls playing boys in early films, Girls Will Be Boys (2016), is an exception (and one cited frequently by Anselmo). Feminist film analysis and reception histories still rarely fully integrate queer and gender nonconforming points of view (usually including a single chapter in an anthology, for example). Anselmo's book, therefore, represents a real breakthrough, one that has been welcomed with great enthusiasm by established feminist film scholars.
[7] Anselmo's work does much more than provide evidence of girls' reception that fleshes out the feminist and queer textual analyses of her forebears, as she asserts. She builds upon and expands previous queer reception scholarship in a way that feels very contemporary, utilizing affect theory, as well as reading strategies and identity constructions/affiliations that reflect the age of social media. Patricia White's assertion in Uninvited that "female homoerotic desire" is a "structuring force in fan reception" (32) is one cited and shared by Anselmo, but she goes further. Anselmo broadens her definition of queer reception to encompass not only the expected categories of homoerotic identification, same-sex desire, and gender nonconformity but also other forms of non-normativity associated with the widely used historical descriptor queer girl during this era. She notes that this term was used to indicate "deviations from normative expectations, including social, behavioral and sexual attitudes" (24). She also views her subjects' sexual and gender identity as a continuum that was impacted by a variety of social and cultural factors. Anselmo's examination of her materials through this more inclusive frame offers an excellent model of the way in which contemporary understandings and methods can be employed to better address historical nuance and complexity.
[8] Anselmo's conceptualization of queerness is particularly productive, even necessary, for her project. Her primary sources are fragmentary, and her subjects are rarely linguistically explicit in terms of specific identities or erotic desires. Instead, as fans do, they largely express intense feelings. During the last decade, affect theory emerged in academia and became particularly useful in examining social media since it provides a way to describe and analyze expressions of feeling arising from the body's responses to media that are often incoherent, non-narrative, and nonlinguistic—what Anselmo calls "spectatorial voltage" (16). Anselmo describes her project as an "affective historiography," a way of "researching past film experiences that cannot be disarticulated from autobiography, emotion and loss and thus must embrace indeterminacy and incompleteness as strengths rather than pitfalls in sociological research" (20). In this regard, she includes her own queer subjectivity and affective response to the material, "the kinship stirred in me as a queer researcher" (27), as an important factor in her analysis.
[9] Moreover, Anselmo's focus on adolescent girl fandom means that she is analyzing a period of these girls' lives in which they are changing a great deal, discovering and developing their interests, desires, ambitions, identities, and psyches, and thus her project examines their "processes of potentiality and becoming" (16). Her close readings of their fannish expressions and creative work underscore the way it is impossible to generalize about their reception or draw clear connections or assumptions about them (e.g., this expression means she's a lesbian). For many of these girls, gender and sexuality are very fluid, and desire and identification regularly morph, converge, and overlap. They take on a variety of adoring positions in relation to their stars, including taking on the positions of male lovers (gender inversion) or speaking in male voices in their love poems; while female stars dominate, some fans worship more feminine male stars as well. Such variety and nuance in fan expressions are well known in fan communities today, but such understandings are only beginning to be applied to historical reception studies.
[10] Although her close reading of fan materials is Anselmo's primary focus and greatest strength, she grounds her interpretations generally solidly within key literary, cultural, political, industrial (film), and psychological/medical contexts and discourses. In a few areas, Anselmo collapses some historical nuance for expediency, most notably in her discussion of the flagging instances of women cross-dressing on the legitimate stage, which she attributes to backlash against the New Women and increasing discourses around homosexuality. While these certainly were important factors, Anselmo overstates their impact. Such discourses were, in fact, unevenly internalized and reproduced; usually white middle-class entertainments and audiences got impacted by them first. Cross-dressing (and reverse-gender vocalizing) remained steady in a very diverse popular performance world through the 1920s in ways that differed along the lines of race, class, and venue. Kathleen Casey's book The Prettiest Girl Onstage is a Man (2015) would be a useful reference here.
[11] Nonetheless, Anselmo excels in providing historical contexts that specifically speak to the experience of her subjects as representatives of educated white middle-class girls. For example, at the same time girls were becoming the chief source of film industry profits, these fans were being maligned in the popular press as hysterical and immature. To unpack this contradiction, Anselmo turns to a strain of eugenics that focused on young women, especially Granville Stanley Hall's book Adolescence (1904). Hall first established adolescence as a particular stage of social development from ages 14–24 (why Anselmo adopts this periodization). He conceptualized the adolescent girl as, in Anselmo's apt phrase, "a childlike mind tucked in an erogenous body" (10), whose opinions and tastes should therefore be disregarded. As Anselmo points out, grown women were also viewed as socially immature by eugenicists, but it is young women whose fan behavior was most attacked and ridiculed in the press and exploited by the film industry, an attitude that persists to this day in many corners.
[12] She also effectively frames her subject's affective expressions in the tradition of women's sentimental fiction, which emerged as a feminized literary form and narrative language in the eighteenth century, persisting through the Victorian era. It privileged the reader's affective investment in the text and the characters' emotional expressivity and self-disclosure. Anselmo demonstrates how this type of lofty, poetic, and fervent love-language was widely reproduced by these film fans, enabling "affective ties to flourish and endure across long geographic distances" (48), such as those between fan and star. "I see your sweet face everyday in the pictures and think of you at night" writes an adoring fan to star Florence Lawrence. Another writes, "I could hold my appreciation and love for you to myself no longer…You [are] to me like the breeze of summer thought" (60). Anselmo notes that by the 1910s, the growth of sexology and public discussions of sexual inversion had begun to cast more suspicion on girls' same-sex relationships, but not their relation toward film stars, where girls writing of their love and devotion remained not only unremarkable but also, in fact, the aim of film publicity. As a result, Anselmo astutely observes, film fandom could provide a cover, an acceptable channel for intense girl-girl desire.
[13] In summation, Anselmo's book is a major accomplishment in her field, providing an invaluable theoretical and historiographic model for film and fan scholars, as well as a trove of primary source material. It is also clearly and accessibly written, offering anyone interested in the history of feminist and queer fandom an informed, thoroughly researched, and immensely pleasurable reception history. For readers of TWC in particular, it's a real treat.