Picture Pain: Anti-Heteronormative Female Fandom in Early Hollywood

Abstract

abstract:The early Hollywood star system provided templates for young women to negotiate struggles with heteronormative femininity and attendant notions of sacrifice, romance, and recovery. Focusing on the movie scrapbook and diary of one white, rural, working young woman, I recover an unknown history of US female reception wherein one heartbroken spectator harnessed film ephemera of movie star divorces, deaths, and diseases to articulate formative queer feelings of difference, dissidence, and defiance.