Note from the Editor

Welcome to the summer issue of Feminist Media Histories (FMH 9.3), the second of two pertaining to Women and the Silent Screen. In my editorial preface to the spring issue, I reminisced on the affective intensities generated by the 11th International Women and the Silent Screen conference (WSSXI) held at Columbia University in New York in June 2022, the first in-person academic event for many attendees (including myself) following the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. More such gatherings now shimmer on the horizon. By the time this issue is released, for instance, the University of Calgary in Canada will have hosted Console-ing Passions, an international conference on television, video, audio, new media, and feminism, while scholars attending the Doing Women’s Film and Television History conference will have convened at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK. I believe I speak for many readers of this journal when I give thanks to the institutions willing to host these events, and reverently salute the individuals who have stepped forward to organize. The value of their labor defies calculation. They create spaces for conversations, interactions, queries, and debates that scatter thought into different linkages and arrangements, that produce unexpected alliances, that forge connections with other media objects, images, or words, and that generate personal as well as critical and conceptual transformations.As I send this issue to press, I wonder if the five contributions included here might constitute a “para-conference” conversation? That sounds a bit clunky. But it is fun to play with Gérard Genette’s concept of the “paratext,” a term he coins to refer to the manifold textual materials and media objects that introduce, prolong, extend, reinforce, organize, or otherwise frame a reader’s relationship to a central text such as a book.1 As Eva Woods Peiró argues in her contribution to this issue, “Paratexts as Portals: Raquel Meller and La gitana blanca (1919/1923),” the concept of a paratextual media ecology might very well define the film culture flourishing in 1920s Spain. Such an ecology includes kiosk literature such as magazines, photos, and postcards; such an ecology foregrounds the star image of female celebrities; and such an ecology is powerful enough to alter the material substance and shape of the presumed organizing text, the film, a point she elaborates through a reading of the 1923 reedited version of a 1919 film, La gitana blanca. In like manner, in “What Women Want: Immersion and Distraction in and around the Movies,” Sarah Keller contends with the proliferation of paratextual media shaping US film culture in the 1910s as one of many historical phenomena that call for a model of spectatorship capable of simultaneously accounting for viewers’ “immersion” in, and “distraction” from, narrative films. While calling for a broader conceptual stance that would dismantle this binary once and for all, Keller explores the potency of such a position through a reading of Eleanor’s Catch (1916), a short film directed by and starring Cleo Madison.The cross-media perspective that Woods Peiró and Keller bring to their case studies echo, in part, methodologies for examining what Richard Dyer famously termed a “star text,” meaning the composite media assemblage amassed from the appearances, roles, allusions, interviews, rumors, commodity tie-ins, fashion-advice and/or eyewitness accounts of a celebrity figure.2 The bewildering abundance of media objects that compose any “star text” inevitably point to a host of cultural discourses, among them (perhaps surprisingly) information about the global influenza pandemic that erupted as World War I ended. As Carolyn Condon Jacobs observes in “Convalescing Profiles: Fan Magazines and Women’s Stories of the Spanish Influenza Pandemic, 1918–1920,” published responses to female fans’ concern over the reported illness of their favorite stars offered a rare forum for discussions of public health at a time when information about the virus commonly known as the Spanish Flu was scant at best.I like to imagine those same fans reading what Charles Musser calls “proto-Hollywood novels,” a genre that flourished in the 1910s and that deploys, he argues, a newly named “feminist” political perspective through dramatic revelations about the sexual harassment that working actresses (and actors) faced in their struggle to succeed. In “The Proto-Hollywood Novel: Feminism, Media Convergences, and Genre Formation,” Musser retrieves a fascinating literary genealogy that includes titles like My Strange Life: The Intimate Life Story of a Moving Picture Actress (1915), Peg O’ the Movies (1913–14), and The Close-Up (1918) among others. Although the celebrity status achieved by female characters in these novels often depends on their “feminist” rejection of heteronormative romance and middle-class domestic ideals, it is a white, middle-class marriage and domestic terrain that provided ground and fodder for the wit of Lucille McVey, also known in the 1910s as “Mrs. Sidney Drew.” As Richard Abel observes in “At Home with Polly and Henry: Mrs. Sidney Drew’s Comedies, 1915–1919,” McVey’s role as performer, writer, codirector, and producer of “genteel” comedies in the 1910s has been overlooked for too long. Structured as a chronological overview of her extant films, many available only as worn archival prints that rarely circulate today, Abel’s essay reveals the robust humor of a “refined” comedy in the period that satirized cultural fads, skewered white middle-class norms, and (“lightly”) mocked misogynistic and patriarchal behaviors.We at the FMH editorial office share this issue with you in hope of continuing the conversations sparked by Women and the Silent Screen XI, and beyond that the energies ignited by Console-ing Passions or the Doing Women’s Film and Television History gatherings among many others. This continuation of our comings-together may be why Genette’s terminology matters as a way of framing the volume at hand. Paratextual operations, as he puts it, not only introduce and extend the meanings of a given text, but more precisely “present it, in the usual sense of this verb, but also in its strongest meaning: to make it present, to assure its presence in the world.”3 As you turn to this issue's contents, may your reading generate questions that provoke debate, and may those debates inspire comments, perhaps a note you share with a friend or thoughts scribbled in the classroom. Whichever media you prefer and in whatever tone or shape: create more texts (and more para-texts for those texts too). Together we secure the ongoing present-tense of feminist media histories.

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