White trash celebrity in the age of eugenics: desecrating Clara Bow

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the desecration of Clara Bow whose celebrity as a movie star and cultural icon exploded across media in the 1920s and early 1930s. Her symbolic and commodity value was synonymous with the erotic provocations of the stereotyped flapper, but her celebrity transgressed Hollywood’s conventional discursive inscription of female stardom as a glamorous attainment of upward mobility, instead infecting it with themes convergent with eugenics discourse. As a consequence, Bow’s desecration was related not just to the eruption of sex scandals, but also to a persistent emphasis on her tainted class identity as ‘white trash’. In this respect, the desecration of Clara Bow anticipated elements of twenty-first-century celebrity formation, including the moral judgements and class shaming directed at ‘chav’ female celebrities associated with British reality television.

KEYWOR:

• Clara Bow
• eugenics
• Hollywood
• celebrity
• social class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Selected fan letters that Bow kept are housed in the Clara Bow Papers in Special Collections of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Study Center in Beverly Hills, CA. Hereafter cited as AMPAS. A few of these letters are referenced by Marsha Orgeron (2009, p. 16) to show ‘how fans actually acted through a form of expression that went well beyond the commercial paradigms’ of fan magazines.

2. Orgeron (2003) details the relationship between ‘IT’, Bow’s status as a commodity, and women’s response to the consumeristic movie culture of fan magazines.

3. Mary Desjardins (2017) discusses Bow’s agency, but she does not address the influence of social class on that agency or on the public construction and reception of Bow as a celebrity.

4. On Bow’s father as ‘shiftless’, see Benham (1930), p. 31. On Robert Bow’s undermining his daughter’s success, see Valentine (1931), pp. 117–118. On Robert’s sexual misadventures as well as his business failures and Clara’s financial support of him, see Tinee (1933), p. D1.

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Notes on contributors

Gaylyn Studlar

Gaylyn Studlar is David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Program in Film & Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Studlar has published widely on Hollywood film and media from feminist historical and theoretical perspectives. Her most recent books are Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema (2013) and Have Gun Will Travel (2015). She has a book in progress called ‘Erotic Labour: Sex, Class, and Stardom in Pre-Code Hollywood’.