Silent Fanfare

Abstract

The affect of this kind of cinematic experience, Russo suggests, is a kind of uncanny longing, ‘a nostalgia for something that they’ve never seen before: themselves on the screen’. What Russo describes as a moment of inchoate queer identification in the cinema’s darkened rooms, Diana W Anselmo terms ‘spectatorial voltage’, the ‘electricity’ that ‘impels fans to retrieve special meaning from a picture, a gesture, a plot, a performance’ (16). It is this ‘voltage’, experienced by North American ‘girl fans’ of the 1910s, that Anselmo seeks to recover and analyse in A Queer Way of Feeling. Like Russo’s imagined queer adolescent, these fans – largely women in their teens and early twenties – found refuge in popular media which seemed, in an oblique way, to have ‘something to do with [their] live[s]’ – with their homoerotic fantasies, their dreams of unconventional lifepaths and their ambivalently gendered narratives of self. Documenting a transitional moment in which medical and criminal discourses of female gendered and sexual deviance gained prominence in the public imagination, Anselmo provides a dual history of the emergence of the Hollywood star system and of an overlooked aspect of early twentieth-century queer media reception. Since Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (1981), a robust scholarship has grown up around the queer subtextual lining of twentieth-century cinema. Anselmo’s intervention is to read not the films themselves, but the fan ephemera that grew up around the stars of the silent screen, analysing the letters, scrapbooks and diaries of the young women and girls across the US who Diana W Anselmo, A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood, Oakland: University of California Press, 2023, 280 pp., £71 hardback, £25 paperback, ISBN: 9780520299658