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Hollywood's Others
Love and Limitation in the Star System
Sprache:
Englisch
Veröffentlicht/Copyright:
2025
Über dieses Buch
We tend to think about movie stars as either glamorous or relatable. But in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Hollywood star system was taking shape, a number of unusual stars appeared on the silver screen, representing groups from which the American mainstream typically sought to avert its eyes. What did it mean for a white entertainment columnist to empathize with an ambiguously gendered Black child star? Or for boys to idolize Lon Chaney, famous for portraying characters with disabilities?
Hollywood’s Others explores the affective ties between white, non-disabled audiences and the fascinatingly different stars with whom they identified—but only up to a point. Katherine Fusco argues that stardom in this era at once offered ways for viewers to connect across group boundaries while also policing the limits of empathy. Examining fan magazines alongside film performances, she traces the intense audience attachment to atypical celebrities and the ways the film industry sought to manage it. Fusco considers Shirley Temple’s career in light of child labor laws and changing notions of childhood; shows how white viewers responded to Black music in depictions of the antebellum South; and analyzes the gender politics of conspiracy theories around celebrity suicides. Shedding light on marginalized stardoms and the anxieties they provoked, Hollywood’s Others challenges common notions about film’s capacity to build empathy.
Hollywood’s Others explores the affective ties between white, non-disabled audiences and the fascinatingly different stars with whom they identified—but only up to a point. Katherine Fusco argues that stardom in this era at once offered ways for viewers to connect across group boundaries while also policing the limits of empathy. Examining fan magazines alongside film performances, she traces the intense audience attachment to atypical celebrities and the ways the film industry sought to manage it. Fusco considers Shirley Temple’s career in light of child labor laws and changing notions of childhood; shows how white viewers responded to Black music in depictions of the antebellum South; and analyzes the gender politics of conspiracy theories around celebrity suicides. Shedding light on marginalized stardoms and the anxieties they provoked, Hollywood’s Others challenges common notions about film’s capacity to build empathy.
Rezensionen
With searching research and brilliant close reading, Fusco offers nothing less than a unified field theory for the neglected films of the classical era: Allen ‘Farina’ Hoskins and Shirley Temple’s child star vehicles, Lon Chaney’s horror movies, and the oeuvres of Hattie McDaniel, Stepin Fetchit, and Roy Rogers. Fusco persuasively demonstrates that the otherness these performers brought to the screen created in American audiences a new form of empathy for the disabled, the abject, and those who suffered racial hatred. Hollywood’s Others is a riveting cultural history and an imaginative tour de force.
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In Hollywood’s Others, Fusco forges a new avenue in star studies, considering difficult, nonnormative, and challenging stars, at once attractive to fans and problematic for Hollywood’s marketing machine. Her careful reading of fan magazines shows how fan culture fostered affective attachments between audiences and stars while working hard to police and contain those bonds, particularly around issues of race, disability, and labor.
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With chapters on child stars, Black supporting actors, displays of nonnormative bodies, and speculations about high-profile celebrity deaths, Hollywood’s Others is a fascinating counternarrative of the Hollywood star system. Fusco provides original, theoretically savvy insights on how star discourse in the 1920s and 1930s negotiated cultural anxieties around age, gender, race, disability, and suicide to manage identification with a diverse range of subjects onscreen other than glamorous, aspirational models.
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From the very first line, Hollywood’s Others demands our attention with its brilliant, complex analysis of a transitional era in film stardom. Katherine Fusco lays out the possibilities and limits of fandom as it is constructed through gender, race, class, and embodiment, turning her attention to the interplay between film and fan industries and the power of white-constructed attachments to perceived nonnormative differences. Hollywood’s Others is a must-read for film, feminist, Black, American, and cultural studies scholars, as well as for those working on early twentieth-century U.S. history.
Fachgebiete
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Frontmatter
i -
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CONTENTS
v -
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
vii -
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INTRODUCTION
1 -
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I THE BABIES
19 -
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II THE NOBODIES
77 -
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III THE UNHAPPY
137 -
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CONCLUSION
167 -
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NOTES
175 -
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
199 -
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INDEX
207
Informationen zur Veröffentlichung
Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch
eBook veröffentlicht am:
2. September 2025
eBook ISBN:
9780231563451
Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch
eBook ISBN:
9780231563451
Zielgruppe(n) für dieses Buch
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
