Description:
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.
Review Quotes: "The book calls cinema and media historians to pay more attention to these early movie-going queer, female adolescents, and to recognize their formative role not in queering fandom, but in inventing it as the participatory, queer, sensory, and worldbuilding range of practices that persist into the present."-- "Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film"