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
Alison Bechdel
Nan Goldin
Diary (1982) from the Barnard Sex Conference (Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson)
Lee Marrs / The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp
Roberta Gregory
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 How have they been archived?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
What is University of Minnesota Press?
Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.