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"Dear Cinema Girls”: Girlhood, Picturegoing and the Interwar Film Magazine
Lisa Smithstead
Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period
Swansea University Author: Lisa Smithstead
Abstract
Throughout this chapter, I profile prominent British cinema magazines on the interwar market and look in greater detail at their address to this girl cinemagoer. The chapter is attentive to the differences between publications and how their inflections of girlhood were mediated through their varied,...
| Published in: | Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period |
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| ISBN: | 9781474412537 |
| Published: |
Edinburgh
Edinburgh University Press
2017
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| Online Access: |
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-women-s-periodicals-and-print-culture-in-britain-1918-1939.html |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa60755 |
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| Abstract: |
Throughout this chapter, I profile prominent British cinema magazines on the interwar market and look in greater detail at their address to this girl cinemagoer. The chapter is attentive to the differences between publications and how their inflections of girlhood were mediated through their varied, intermedial modes of address. Representations of girlhood within these papers were built predominantly around young, and largely American female star images, but they were also constructed through particular uses of the specific tools and techniques of magazine media. The film paper blended photographs, film stills and illustrations with prose, storytelling and advertising, and scattered representations of its stars across these varied platforms, breaking apart the sense of a gendered star identity as stable or singular. Film periodicals thus invited readers into a complex and unstable network of film-inflected girlhoods. They did so in a period during which youthful femininity was defined more closely in relation to class and marital status than age, in which British class structures were reformulating, and in which representations of the unmarried working girl and young wife had complex roles to play in defining a national culture after the war. As such, reading the interwar film magazine is one way of re-reading the narrative of ‘home and duty’, complicating a domestic ideal by offsetting more glamorous images and alternative possibilities of modern femininity against more conservative discourses on domesticity and female identity. The print cultures of film affected ideas about girlhood, class and mass culture between the wars in this way, allowing their readers to simultaneously assign, test out and in some ways re-write girls’ culturally ascribed domestic roles. |
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| Item Description: |
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-women-s-periodicals-and-print-culture-in-britain-1918-1939.html |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |