In Visible Archives
Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s
Margaret Galvan
Exploring a number of feminist and cultural touchstones—the feminist sex wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the women in print movement, and countercultural grassroots periodical networks—In Visible Archives examines how visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities.
In 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the community networks that produced this resonant artifact and others, analyzing how visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities.
Margaret Galvan explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones—the feminist sex wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the women in print movement, and countercultural grassroots periodical networks—and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. She goes deep into the records to bring together a decade’s worth of research in grassroots and university archives that include comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other image-text media produced by women, including Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson, Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin.
The art highlighted in In Visible Archives demonstrates how women represented their bodies and sexualities on their own terms and created visibility for new, diverse identities, thus serving as blueprints for future activism and advocacy—work that is urgent now more than ever as LGBTQ+ and women’s rights face challenges and restrictions across the nation.
Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.
$28.00 paper ISBN 978-1-5179-0324-4
$112.00 cloth ISBN 978-1-5179-0323-7
336 pages, 65 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, October 2023
Margaret Galvan is assistant professor of English at the University of Florida.
Contents
Introduction: Making Visible Archives
1. The Collage Activists: Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson Frame the Feminist Sex Wars
2. The Comics Visionaries: Lee Marrs’s and Roberta Gregory’s Underground Feminism
3. The Newspaper Cartoonist: Alison Bechdel’s Queer Grassroots Networks
4. The Editor and Pedagogue: Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Public Drawing
5. The Photographer and Curator: Nan Goldin’s Witness to HIV/AIDS
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index