Declarations of love scribbled in pink stationary. Headshots scissored and pasted on yellowing paper. Handwritten tallies penned on the back of schoolbooks, keeping score of movie ticket prices and photoplays last seen. Amateur Kodaks placed side by side stars’ photo-postcards while, on the margins of the page, inked hearts and hand-colored ladybugs perch next to an actress’ autograph or oversee a penciled-in film review. This panoply of handcrafted artifacts—singular, subjective, and rare—is the main research object of my dissertation.
    Stitching together legislation, psychology literature, newspapers, and film magazines with unpublished fan letters, movie scrapbooks, and journals, my dissertation sets out to unearth the fan practices and private film archives of the first generation of American girls to grow up with the pictures. I focus on the 1910s, a transitional decade in U.S. history when both adolescence and cinema entered America’s popular imagination. I propose that the concurrent cultural emergence of adolescence and Hollywood’s star system spurred a foundational paradigm of fan investment, one that seminally married youth and femininity with intemperate consumption and passionate attachment to individual movie stars. It is that figure, originally dubbed “the screen-struck girl,” that I read as a building-block of American movie fandom, the genesis of today’s youth-oriented and fan-driven commercial film culture.  
    Divided in two parts, my dissertation investigates both sides of girl movie fandom: the public side, disseminated in trade and fan magazines and composed of commissioned illustrations and articles, as well as girls’ published fan mail, suicide notes, and photographs; and the private side, crafted in girls’ homes and in the company of their peers, which is comprised of unpublished collages, correspondence, and diaries. My reading of both corpuses not only excavates the participatory practices and empowering ways girls manipulated movie ephemera to articulate unconventional aspirations and same-sex desires; it also sheds unprecedented light on the network of alternative economies, peer communities, and craft labor undergirding moviegoing girls’ unremunerated fan production.
    By pivoting my dissertation on previously unexamined fan materials, I aim to bring forth a new and untapped film archive that fleshes out early female audiences, while historicizing the complex web of privilege, pleasure, power, and discrimination underlining the original rapport established between America’s fledgling film industry and the first cohort of girls to be culturally construed as both “adolescent” and “screen-struck."