I had to check when the chapter from Hansen about Rudolph Valentino was written after I finished it and it made a lot of sense that it was from the 1980s. The article's attempt to use the language of "transsexual" and "transvestite" (pg. 269, for one example) may have functioned at the time the article was written--though I'm skeptical of even that--but that part is pretty much nonsensical today. How the article emphasized gender was a pretty challenging part for me. Identification with a character, a star, etc., who is of a different gender than you are (or a different gender than you've been assigned, if we want to actually talk about transness) can be interesting, but not really the way this article went about it. This is especially an issue around the article's conflation of gender and sexuality, by focusing some on what happens when the woman viewer identifies with the character whose gaze and attraction is the subject of the film but mixing that up with a conversation about gender and "spectatorial cross-dressing" (269).
I would love to read on article that engages with how trans folks identify with stars of various genders and how that operates, because I think that's a pretty interesting conversation around what celebrities do for gender, identification, aspirations, etc. This article kind of used that language, but in such a 1980s, outdated, confusing way that it just muddled up any actual point it was making, in my opinion.
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