Go away. But come back soon.
What is a girl star and what do we want from her? Shirley Temple and Lindsay Lohan are two girl stars, different in presentation and in historical and industrial context, but both representative of the field of beautiful, talented youth in which they shone. The girl star grows up in the spotlight, but the culture’s gaze becomes impatient as the strangely balanced qualities of precocity and naturalness that made her a child star start to signal adult sex. [1]
The mechanism for this impatience? A clock counting the girl forward to her birthday, ticking away a fallow time. The teen years are a vacuum of meaning: not child, but not woman. They are also a frustration, a time to be gotten through: Go away, but come back. This tale of two girlhoods, Temple’s and Lohan’s, sheds light on what “woman” means in the world of eroticized youth—the moment at which the protective clothing of the law drops away from the girl body—as well as the constrained field in which teen girls voice their own desires and aspirations.
Before Disney began raising flocks of sterile-yet-desirable young people to entertain the nation, but after California had raised the age of consent from sixteen to eighteen in 1913, there was Shirley Temple. Unlike teens and twenty-somethings such as Mary Pickford and Mae Marsh who played girls in the silent era, or the Our Gang (Little Rascals) kids who aged out of their stardom, Temple was a child star who grew up in the public eye. Portraying one adorable orphan after another, Shirley was the perfect star for the 1930s. The natural successor to Dickens’ nineteenth-century waifs, Temple taught Americans that pluck and good cheer guaranteed success in family and finance. The end of a Shirley Temple film finds her installed in a middle-class family every time. This plot trajectory leads Lori Merish to describe Temple as a model commodity that “generates an appropriative desire to ‘rescue’ the cute object by resituating it within a properly loving and appreciative (i.e., affectionally normative) family context.” [2] But if child stars like Temple are the perfect form of one sort of commodity, teen stars are neither here (cute) nor there (sexually available); instead, they stand poised between one market and another.