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Screen-Struck: The Invention of the Movie Girl Fan
- Cinema Journal
- University of Texas Press
- Volume 55, Number 1, Fall 2015
- pp. 1-28
- 10.1353/cj.2015.0067
- Article
- Additional Information
This article examines questions of agency, identity, and fan-industry collaboration underpinning the fabrication of an exclusively feminine personification of excessive film fandom. Dubbed “the screen-struck girl,” this white, adolescent figure was presented in American fan magazines and popular newspapers of the 1910s as a pathological consumer and a self-erasing aspiring star. However, in autobiographical letters to the press, girl fans proudly self-identified as movie bingers and aspiring actresses. Investigating girl fans’ willing and public adherence to such a pejorative stereotype, I complicate our understanding of early twentieth-century female fan agency and its relation to Hollywood’s burgeoning press machine.