Diana W. Anselmo and Maggie Hennefeld on “A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood” (UC Press, 2023)

Maggie Hennefeld interviews Diana W. Anselmo about her new book, A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023), which 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. Anselmo and Hennefeld discuss queer fandom, archival research, feminist historiography, movie love, and the precarious social conditions in which passionate audiences find their voices through unlikely means.

Read more about A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood on the University of California Press website. Use the discount code SAVE30 at checkout for a 30% discount.

Click here for a free download of the introduction.

Diana W. Anselmo is a feminist film historian and queer immigrant. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Screen, Camera Obscura, Film History, JCMS: the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Journal of Women’s History. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, and the International Association for Media and History, among others. She is the author of A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023).

Faculty Profile

Maggie Hennefeld is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018), an editor of the journal Cultural Critique (UMN Press) and of two volumes: Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke UP, 2020). She is a curator of the 4-disc DVD/Blu-ray set, Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), which includes 99 archival feminist silent films. Her next book, Death by Laughter, Female Hysteria, and Early Cinema is forthcoming from Columbia UP in 2024. 

Faculty Profile

Click here for Angie Fazekas’s review of A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans and Personal Archives of Early Hollywood in issue 21.2 of New Review of Film and Television Studies.

Stay tuned for Diana Anselmo’s forthcoming article “’I Want to Be Good:’ Morality, Faith, and Female Spectatorial Pleasure during World War I,” appearing in issue 22.1 of New Review of Film and Television Studies.

Want to listen to more? Here’s another podcast episode we’ve featured, on Stacey Abbott’s BFI Classics volume Near Dark