Description
Book SynopsisIn the 1930s, Shirley Temple was heralded as “America’s sweetheart”, and she remains the icon of wholesome American girlhood, but Temple’s films strike many modern viewers as perverse.
Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood examines her early career in the context of the history of girlhood and considers how Temple’s star image emerged out of the Victorian cult of the child.
Trade Review"Hatch's work serves as both a specific and well-evidenced case study for scholars interested in understanding Shirley Temple's legacy as well as an effective overview of the changing concept of white American girlhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." * Film Quarterly *
"
Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood is a provocative and compelling analysis of not just Shirley Temple's stardom but a nexus of issues around childhood and stardom more generally, including the erotics of performance, male child-loving, censorship, and race." -- Pamela Wojcik * University of Notre Dame *
"What a pleasure to see the recent expansion of scholarship on Shirley Temple. Kristen Hatch's contribution is both substantive and subtle—her analysis of gender and age in early Hollywood bears strongly on our current moment." -- Diane Negra * University College Dublin *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Sex and Shirley Temple
1 America’s Sweethearts: Mary Pickford, Shirley Temple, and the Decline of Sentiment
2 A Terrible Amour: Child Loving in the Twentieth Century
3 Immaculate Amalgamation: Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple
4 Baby Burlesks and Kiddie Kabarets: Children’s Erotic Impersonations
5 Priceless: Economic Innocence and the Child Star
Epilogue
