The Gender of Early Cinema

Abstract

When an editor includes themself amongst their contributors, they can easily – and erroneously – come to see their own contribution as typical of the whole. When Part 2 of this double special issue rolls around, readers will encounter my own account of the pervasive tendency in popular film discourse in the UK during the 1910s and 1920s to overtly code cinema female, and may suspect that this double special issue bears the title “The Gender of Early Cinema” because I see all of my fellow contributors as doing essentially the same thing, in ignorance of the conspicuous variety of subjects – women service workers in cinemas (Emily Drummer and Lise Shapiro Sanders’s article), working-class women’s (proto)-cinephilic practices (Sonia Brand-Fisher’s article), the storehouse of concepts allied to the term ‘dainty’ in film discourse (Pansy Duncan’s article), ‘star search’ competitions aimed solely at women (Chris O’Rourke’s article), the career of the theatre performer/director and cinema performer/producer Mărioara Voiculescu (Ana Grgić’s article), and female characters and female performers in films between 1903 and 1919 who overtly attacked the gender norms of their surrounding cultures (Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi’s archive feature) – that are considered in the following pages. But these six contributions alone, even in the momentary absence of the others forthcoming in Part 2, demonstrate that across its many overlapping spheres of activity cinema had its own gender, not in the sense that cinema was feminine as distinct from masculine (or, indeed, vice versa), i.e. one gender category out of two, and only two, available gender categories; instead, cinema had its own gender in the sense that it endorsed this specific version of the theoretically unlimited number of versions that gender – defined as the habituated norms of thought and action applied to people according to their perceived sex – can take at any given moment. Because it is ‘just’ a set of ideas, gender is highly variable, meaning that it can manifest in many slightly different versions even in one region at one historical moment, and every field of human activity offers opportunities for such difference. Both acknowledging and building on an already substantial body of work, the contributions to this double special issue collectively show that although the specific version of this cluster of norms – which we call ‘gender’ – that circulated in the many fields of activity associated with cinema during the period before 1920 admitted of some internal variation, this specific cluster of norms nonetheless collectively constituted a very specific set of ideas about masculinity and femininity that, amongst its other elements, a) acknowledged substantial similarities between men and women, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly, b) maintained a long-standing attribution to women’s bodies