In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s by Margaret Galvan

Margaret Galvan’s book In Visible Archives considers how 1980s feminist and queer visual culture formed and sustained communities. The title introduces this: Parsed too quickly, it might read as “invisible,” pointing to how the value of feminist and queer material has not always been seen; the space forces readers to think for a second. The book is concerned with how choices about the layouts of words and images construe their meaning individually and in combination. Galvan makes careful, sophisticated readings of the work of eight women, encompassing diverse material, including a conference program, comics, newspapers, and an exhibition catalog, as well as the ways in which visual culture sustained radical politics.

Galvan’s method is what we might call “comics-led.” Largely drawing on comics studies applied to a much broader array of sources, it operationalizes Colin Beineke’s notion of “comicity” as “a comics-focused way to engage analytically with other artistic formats that would benefit from similar image-text analysis” (6). Through zine studies and critical archive work, Galvan considers the material in physical terms. This approach is flexible enough that it can be used to work through a considerable corpus without being driven by a rigid sampling regime, paying dividends across the various examples used. As a method, it will be of considerable value to anyone trying to study images and texts together.

The book is, in effect, comprised of two sections. The first two chapters are concerned with the work of several women. In chapter 1 Galvan approaches the feminist sex wars through the printed program of the infamous Feminist IX conference at Barnard College in 1982, Diary of a Conference on Sexuality and related publications, drawing on archives to render visible choices made by Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson. Her comics-led method enables Galvan to unpack some complex material subtly, such as a grayed-out “blank” page in the Diary after that portion detailing the history of the Barnard Women’s Center was censored by Barnard College (32); readers will see the parallels with recent and ongoing repressive actions by the college’s administrators.¹ Chapter 2 focuses on underground comics, looking at Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory and how they used comics for feminist political purposes, pushing against often-misogynist comic culture, and reflecting on how we read such material in the archive. The material is of course saved, but the politics of institutional preservation present tensions against community and individual archival impulses.

Each of the three chapters in the second part of the book considers an individual artist. Chapter 3 takes Alison Bechdel’s early work in a queer publishing context, including the immediacy of weekly newspaper strips (113). Here, Galvan’s comics-led approach looks at Bechdel’s cartoons shown in WomaNews along with adjacent material she designed, such as covers, adverts, and graphics for articles, all seen as part of a unifying aesthetic deployed in the service of building queer community and coalition broadening (135–36). It is a powerful tool to consider mise-en-page and other contextual material alongside questions of labor and archiving. There is scope to develop discussion in terms of how this was all physically (re)produced. Chapter 4 offers an engaging account of how Gloria Anzaldúa, known best for her literary work, used visual materials to illustrate lectures as part of an “evolving visual practice” (165). Some surviving lecture note transparencies are reproduced (unfortunately, these color images are reproduced grayscale in the paperback, but the online version is in color). Finally, chapter 5 considers Nan Goldin’s photography, taking the printed book of her famous Ballad of Sexual Dependency exhibition to consider how she “builds her community through this format” using both words and images (187) and how Goldin not only memorialized but also archived queer lives during the AIDS crisis, partly by making multiple images (198).

The sheer complexity of the visual and political networks that Galvan so deftly navigates makes this book very difficult to synthesize. It is the product of a serious amount of careful archival work. This sophisticated gathering—almost a collage—is concerned with a fundamental question of how queer and feminist political action and community-building were enabled and articulated through reproducible visual cultures. Galvan puts together different elements of these cultures and sees them as part of an ecosystem. What is presumably a press’s stylistic choice for a very short conclusion means the book finishes with a three-page epilogue. This did not give Galvan the opportunity to pull together the argument in synoptic discussion, which would have been welcome. This has partly been displaced to iterative reflection around archives and community. With reference to zine studies (11) and work by archivists seeing collections as sites for political work, archiving feminist struggles, as repositories for immediate use (13–14), Galvan repeatedly engages in “critical conversations around archives” (227).

In her epilogue, Galvan reflects on digitization and its limits. Certainly, it democratizes access, but the fragility of library websites has recently been grimly demonstrated by cyberattacks. Scans of material lose haptic qualities, and certain kinds of research, in particular, serious bibliographical work, will likely always be contingent on physical access. There is a free-to-read “Manifold” edition of this book supported by electronic resources, including interactive visualizations of individuals involved with Equal Time (1986–90) and WomaNews (1983–85) at the same time as Bechdel. These hint too at the scale of Galvan’s hard archival work.

Arguments are explicitly signposted throughout the book, which will be well received by those using it in classrooms, whether considering queer and feminist cultures in the 1980s, discussing the role of archives in support of activism, or designing methods to approach visual-textual sources. For book historians and comic studies alike, this will be of obvious and immediate importance.