Overview

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.

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Reviews

With searching research and brilliant close reading, Katherine Fusco offers nothing less than unified field theory for the neglected films of the classical era: Allen “Farina” Hoskins and Shirely Temple’s child star vehicles, Lone Chaney’s horror movies, and the oeuvres of Cheney, 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, guiding spectators out of the Depression and through WWII into a more generous community. Hollywood’s Others is a riveting cultural history and an imaginative tour de force. -- Julia Stern, author of <i>Bette Davis Black and White</i> With chapters on child stars, Black supporting actors, displays of non-normative bodies, and speculations about high-profile celebrity deaths, Katherine Fusco has written a fascinating counter-narrative 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. -- Will Scheibel, author of <i>Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front</i> From the very first line, Hollywood's Others demands our attention with its brilliant, complex analysis of a transitional era in film stardom. Fusco boldly lays out the possibilities and limits of fandom as it is constructed through gender, race, class, and embodiment. These are not arguments you've heard before; they are gorgeously written analyses of the interplay between film and fan industries and the power of white-constructed attachments to perceived non-normative differences. The book's discussion of stardom, race, and fan/critical/historical memory is so wholly original that I gasped aloud while reading. Hollywood's Others is a must-read for film, feminist, Black, American, and cultural studies scholars, as well as for those working on early 20th century US history. -- Samantha Pinto, author of <i>Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights</i> In Hollywood’s Others Katherine 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. -- Shelley Stamp, author of <i>Lois Weber in Early Hollywood</i>

Author Information

Katherine Fusco is associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity (2016) and coauthor of Kelly Reichardt: Emergency and the Everyday (with Nicole Seymour, 2017).

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