Hollywood's others love and limitation in the star system

We tend to think about stars as either aspirational or relatable: glamorous or the girl/boy-next-door. However, throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the years in which the Hollywood star system was becoming codified, a number of "unusual" stars appeared across the American silver screen: a man best known for being unrecognizable (Lon Chaney); an interracial gang of child actors who moved in and out of roles as they aged (Our Gang); a little girl who simultaneously embodied rigorous professionalism and childhood innocence (Shirley Temple); and a number of publicly unhappy women (Jean Harlow and Katherine Hepburn). Drawing from fan magazines, film performances, and production materials, Hollywood's Others examines how social categories that generated antipathy or indifference for majority culture Americans off-screen generated intense audience interest and attachment when on screen. Katherine Fusco argues that these stars and film culture during this period provided ways for the majority culture to empathize with marginalized communities in new ways but this relationship was politically, socially, and culturally circumscribed. Thus, the character of Farina in Our Gang provided an opportunity to imagine an integrated society but only up until he became an adolescent at which point broader national anxieties about Black masculinity and racialized sexuality came to the fore. Likewise, glamorous female stars such as Jean Harlow and Katherine Hepburn each suffered from and were punished for their public quests for professionalism. In addition to expanding the canon of star studies, especially through its focus on child performers and African-American actors, Hollywood's Others reframes the way the field thinks about matters of identification and celebrity's interaction with broader political contexts, arguing that rather than shaping audience identities, stardom functioned primarily as a mode of encouraging and restraining empathy and attachment.