Comics, visual culture, and feminism in the 1980s

In Visible Archives is a book that explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones of the 1980s and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. Author Margaret Galvan goes deep into the archives to bring together a decade’s worth of research that includes comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other media produced by women including Nan Goldin, Alison Bechdel, Lee Marrs, and Gloria Anzaldúa. Galvan demonstrates how women represented their bodies and sexualities on their own terms and created visibility for new, diverse identities. Galvan is joined here in conversation with Anna Peppard and Ramzi Fawaz.

Margaret Galvan is assistant professor of English at the University of Florida and author of In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s.

Anna Peppard is a writer, researcher, podcaster, and educator. Peppard is an adjunct lecturer in the department of Communication, Popular Culture, and Film at Brock University and editor of Supersex: Sexuality, Fantasy, and the Superhero.

Ramzi Fawaz is an award-winning queer cultural critic, public speaker, and educator. Fawaz is a Romnes Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and author of Queer Forms and The New Mutants.

Episode references:

Trina Robbins

Hillary Chute / Graphic Women

Gloria Anzaldúa / Borderlands and This Bridge Called My Back

Alison Bechdel

Nan Goldin

Diary (1982) from the Barnard Sex Conference (Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson)

Kristen Hogan / The Feminist Bookstore Movement

Lee Marrs / The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp

Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (exhibit)

Roberta Gregory

Maria Cotera / Chicana por mi Raza (digital project)

Chicana Movidas / edited by Dionne Espinoza, María Eugenia Cotera, and Maylei Blackwell

In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s is available from University of Minnesota Press. This book has an open-access Manifold edition that is free to read online.

"Margaret Galvan asks all the right questions about queer and feminist visual storytelling from the 1980s: Where were these works situated? How did communities use them? How have they been archived? Both commentary upon as well as an integral part of the activist project begun by the creators themselves, In Visible Archives helps keep these remarkable works visible for us all."
—Justin Hall, California College of the Arts, editor of No Straight Lines

"This wonderful book demonstrates the critical importance of community-based archives. Utilizing primary source materials, Margaret Galvan has produced an original and consequential contribution to the history of the feminist sex wars, and her attention to the visual aspects of those documents provides long overdue recognition to the period’s artists, designers, and activists."
—Gayle Rubin, University of Michigan