By Amelia Skinner Saint
Galvan, Margaret. In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s. University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
This book is available in full digital format at manifold.umn.edu.
Three lipstick marks on the cover of Margaret Galvan’s In Visible Archives are an invitation; a kiss hello, a suggestion of intimacy, an enticement that draws the reader into the text. Galvan’s book, nominated for an Eisner award, examines a variety of image-texts from creators working within and across the feminist movement during the 1980s. These texts explore the margins, gaps, and intersections within the movement, such as queer feminism, the feminist sex wars, the struggle to center women of color, and the devastation of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Galvan discusses an array of lesser-known works from feminist artists and creators such as Lee Marrs, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin. Whereas the images, like lip prints, remain visible long after the context of their creation has passed into history, the crux of Galvan’s study is the paradoxical invisibility of these artists’ early work, which is largely only available in limited, physical archives. Galvan’s book works, in part, as a means of opening these archives, both by broadcasting their existence to a wider audience, and by compiling, abridging, and encapsulating a curated portion of their contents for the reader.
Galvan begins her examination of texts with one that is rare even in feminist archives: Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, which served as schedule, manifesto, and collective philosophy for the planners of the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality. The Diary’s creators, Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson, used collage techniques and a DIY aesthetic to build images out of postcards, art, and objects collected and contributed by conference panelists and the Barnard community. The Diary, however, became the locus of controversy when anti-pornography activists claimed that the document was inherently anti-feminist because it contained sexually explicit images. The outcry led Barnard to pull the Diary from the conference proceedings, releasing a censored version months later which allowed the images to remain but removed any mention of Barnard College. While portions of the Diary have been reprinted, the entire, uncensored version exists in very few archival spaces. By bringing the Diary back into the cultural conversation, Galvan highlights one of the encumbrances to activism: in-fighting. She withholds outright judgement on the topic of the internal conflict—whether or not sexually explicit material is inherently anti-feminist—however her discussion leaves no doubt that the suppression of the Diary was a great and ultimately unnecessary loss.
Whereas the first text Galvan analyzes in her book is one that was rendered intentionally rare via censorship, the next group of texts she discusses are ones originally intended for easy consumption that have since become scarce due to their ephemeral nature. Chapter 2 focuses on two underground feminist comix artists, Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory. In their early titles, Dynamite Damsels (1976) and The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (1973-77), Gregory and Marrs explore second-wave feminism from within the movement. However, their coming-of-age comix tales find little space for their queer and big-bodied protagonists within the movement. Gregory’s protagonist in Damsels, Freida, identifies deeply with feminist movement, but as a lesbian in the age of the “lavender menace,” is marginalized. One moment in the book that Galvan highlights shows a butch lesbian being locked in a closet to prevent her from being seen as part of the broader movement. Galvan’s reading of these comix within the broader context of their archives collected alongside independent newspapers, queer zines, and other cultural ephemera, offers a richer and more complete picture of the meaning contemporary readers may derive from these comix. Some of the images that Galvan chooses to reprint, such as a page from issue one of Girl Blimp (78), depict or reference things that a modern reader might find baffling without the analogous archival context that Galvan provides, offering the reader not just a glimpse at what is in the archives, but a chance to understand its meaning on a cultural level.
Because these comix were meant to be consumed and discarded, they were ephemeral artifacts and very much of their time and cultural moment. Galvan places these often discarded and much forgotten objects within multiple layers of cultural, political and social context by locating them across multiple archives and examining them in different archival contexts which grasp at preserving the contemporary lived context. Galvan examines where comix like Marrs’ and Gregory’s are placed in relation to other independent comix, how they are categorized within different collections, and even who has collected them, and what other titles those collectors hold in their archives. This examination of multiple archives reveals how, even in the already marginalized world of indy comix, queer, feminist titles were pushed to the margins of the margins. However, it is in this liminal space where the artists in Galvan’s book create room for new voices. Writing on the Lesbian Herstory Archives’ choice to move their collection containing Marrs’ and Gregory’s early comix to a more prominent space, Galvan writes: “This move acknowledges the import of comics to the LGBTQ communities today, as we are currently in the midst of an unprecedented queer comics boom. Because of this popularity, comics that were overlooked in the past, like those of Marrs and Gregory, may have an opportunity to influence new generations of artists in the future” (108).
In chapter three, Galvan moves from some of the more obscure comic artists of the movement to one who has become a household name: Alison Bechdel. Galvan focuses primarily on Bechdel’s early comics and illustration career, which started in the early 80s in queer, independent newspapers, such as Equal Time and WomaNews. Her comics and illustrations were funny and inviting, drawing a new audience into the grassroots feminist movement. We learn from Galvan that Bechdel’s long-running, widely syndicated strip Dykes to Watch Out for was largely self-syndicated, a laborious and intensive process that left Bechdel with a massive personal archive of papers that carried her comic strips. According to Galvan, Bechdel’s personal archives also include letters and responses from readers and editors, all of which went “in the hopper,” as Bechdel puts it. In this chapter, Galvan turns more toward the act of creation and how the artist’s personal archive fueled that process. Self-archiving is part of the grassroots, community-driving practices of preserving the materials that drove and documented the feminist movement in all of its many, messy stages. Galvan is interested not only in studying discrete archived materials but looking through a single archive and across multiple archives to capture a deeper understanding of the vital community and context surrounding the discrete materials that survive in archival spaces.
Some of the archives that Galvan explores are the only places where certain artists’ materials can be viewed and engaged with. One such example is the primary subject of chapter 4: Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s lecture slides and notes. Anzaldúa is probably best known as co-editor of the feminist essay collection This Bridge Called My Back (1981), which centered voices of women of color in the feminist movement. In addition to her work as a writer, editor, and scholar, Anzaldúa was an engaging speaker who traveled extensively, giving talks about her work in the feminist movement and her particular standpoint as a Chicana scholar. She incorporated labeled and explicated transparency drawings into her talks, which have been preserved in the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. These drawings of simple, abstract characters drew her viewers in, allowing them to project themselves onto the transparency alongside the images and text. Whereas Bechdel, Marrs, and Gregory achieved visibility for marginalized queer voices through specific and particular representations, Anzaldúa achieved identification across intersecting Chicana, queer, and feminist identities by rendering open figures. Both approaches succeeded, Galvan writes, in building community activism and shifting the feminist movement toward a more racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse center.
At the time of her death in 2004, Anzaldúa left a vast collection of material encompassing a wide swath of the feminist movement and community, which was collected alongside other vital cultural objects from the Latin diaspora in the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Project and Archive. This digitized and broadly available archive, about which Galvan writes extensively as an example of the archive as community activism, allows objects to remain within familial or private collections, while also placing them in a preserved, contextualized, and publicly available archival space. Projects such as this one speak to the vitality of these objects and their importance in our cultural history, particularly in a moment when there are concerted efforts to erase and ignore the history of oppression and race and gender violence in the United States. University and national archives may fail, but grassroots collections such as Chicana por mi Raza, Galvan points out, are not subject to institutional whims. In her discussion of how Anzaldúa built her own archive, and how related archives, including Chicana por mi Raza, were compiled, Galvan highlights the community building and collaborative nature of composing an archive of related material. This is the vital element that is perhaps missed or forgotten when one visits an archive and finds a collection of seemingly inert papers, books, and images. Galvan’s book goes a long way toward bringing this vitality to the fore.
In the final chapter, Galvan turns to the photography and writing of Nan Goldin, whose work in Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, both deal with making marginalized communities visible. The Ballad, which was composed mainly of Goldin’s own photos, takes the form of a series of slideshows set to music. The images of the slideshows highlighted sexuality, sexual difference, and gendered violence, while the lyrics of the songs provided the text that was meant to accompany the images. The shows eventually became a book, which is still widely available. Witnesses, on the other hand, was an exhibit curated by Goldin that centered victims of the HIV/AIDS crisis in an effort to place a human face on the misunderstood and ignored crisis. Galvan examines the catalog of the Witnesses exhibit, which included essays written by Goldin and other artists who contributed photographs. Like the other artists in Galvan’s book, Goldin’s work was dedicated to garnering broader visibility and sympathy for victims of HIV/AIDS during a time when those suffering from the disease were marginalized and disregarded. The tragic irony of that mission, Galvan points out, is that so much of the work has been effectively lost to time as it was found in ephemeral spaces such as exhibitions, shows, talks, and disposable media.
Unfortunately, many of the archives that house the pieces discussed in In Visible Archives are not easily accessed by the general public. Part of the work of In Visible Archives is to bring awareness to the archive’s role in social and cultural movements, but also to bring those archives into a broader sphere of cultural awareness, giving readers access to images, documents, and summaries of archived material. As we endure a period of historic erasure, it is more vital than ever that we can trace the paths that have been worn before, to track where we have been and how we might forge ahead after suffering a cultural loss (such as the loss of legal rights, etc.); that is precisely what Galvan’s book does. In Visible Archives is not merely a text documenting the scholarly, cultural, and social role of archives, but is also a record that reminds readers of the vital and concrete work of activism. The images that invite us into books and archives, the ones that show us someone other than ourselves or very like ourselves, the ones that invite us to project our own faces onto them, the ones that stare back at us so directly from beyond that it breaks our hearts, those images must not be lost, because they are more than a historical record; they are a proving ground for battles that are still being fought. In her Epilogue, Galvan discusses ongoing efforts to digitize many of the archives that she poured over in her research, making them broadly accessible, which is, one must believe, no less than the artists in Galvan’s book would have demanded.