Margaret Galvan is Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her research examines how visual culture operates within the print media of feminist and queer social movements in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Her first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s explores how publishing practices and archives have shaped understandings of the visual within feminist and queer activism.
This episode is being released on World AIDS Day. Margaret’s book is partly focused on the tragedy of AIDS for a generation of people that saw the virus disproportionately attack people on the margins. The prejudicial social engineering that created a system of disposability around AIDS meant that those who were suffering had to use every point of leverage at their disposal. Galvan talks about the ways that artists “responded when the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s fractured their communities. Artists scrambled to preserve their queer worlds—not only through direct action on the street, but also through their own artwork.” We talk, in particular, about Nan Goldin’s enduring work and the way that it “politically activates her community and their losses through image and text,” and how Goldin “refused to allow HIV/AIDS to remain a shameful, private matter.”
Galvan’s book is all about archiving as a strategy, so there’s a fair amount of time spent here discussing different approaches to the archive, how archives function politically and why certain archives are seen as relevant while others are not, or certain ways of expressing desire or identity are seen as a threat. Galvan reads across archives to to sense how sense memory is preserved by an archive, or how memory is rendered immobilized through a process of arresting the archive.
If texts are hybrid, multiple and meaningful to people, then they can also, Margaret says, be a "guide for future activism.” We’ve all seen the ways in which a text can change the course of someone’s thinking, and how that detour through a different way of being can open up new pathways for political action. What I find really compelling about Galvan’s book, and her way of approaching this paradigm, is that she never abandons a sense of the historical context in favour of analyzing the text’s content. The two things are inextricable, and that means that we get a picture of the ways that texts present the present politically.
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