Abstract

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.

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