Movie-Mad Girls: Female Suicidality in Early Twentieth-Century United States

This is an online event.

Diana W. Anselmo’s work explores the cultural and political reach of “bad feelings” beyond the strictly psychoanalytic. She turns attention to the archives of self-injury underwriting silent-film female fandom to track the impact segregation and social denial have had on young women throughout US history, and to interrogate how Hollywood cinema works to reaffirm feelings of exclusion and belonging in immigrant, poor, nonwhite, nonconforming, and/or disabled female consumers. In this paper, Anselmo surveys published reports of a movie-motivated “girl suicide” wave sweeping the United States around World War I. Highlighting girls’ own words as preserved in crime reports and suicide letters, Anselmo argues that, though easily interpreted as artifacts of female failure, movie-inspired suicide notes, criminal testimonies, and forensic reports can be read as testaments of queer film reception: a powerful nonnormative response to conservative iconography, a grievance-driven media attachment that willfully went against conventions regulating female propriety, well-being, and recovery by instead embracing moral, social, and legal disobedience.

The History of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Seminar invites you to join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper. Learn more.

Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays. 

Register to attend online