Invisible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s

Invisible Archives makes a distinctive contribution to the growing body of scholarship documenting women’s liberation and gay liberation, and the aesthetic and activist movements that grew out of them. Written queer manifestos and feminist journals have received extensive scholarly attention; the accompanying art, comics, and photographs have drawn less attention in feminist and queer studies. Galvan’s analysis of visual feminist and queer traditions makes an essential contribution to this broader scholarship, connecting visual culture to larger debates of the 1980s: the lesbian sex wars, AIDS and assimilation, intersectionality and representation. I had never seen the original program for the 1982 Barnard Sex Conference, and by starting with a careful analysis of the visual program and a genealogy of the queer visual tradition from which the artists emerged, Galvan makes the case that visual culture is central to broader debates about feminist theory and politics.Invisible Histories begins with the premise that “it’s crucial we reconnect to and make these earlier visual activisms visible for new generations of artists” (12–13). It then proceeds to focus on case studies of important artists and thinkers: Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson, Lee Marrs, Roberta Gregory, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldua, and Nan Goldin. The first two chapters focus on visual artists who are lesser known in feminist and queer scholarship; the final three focus on well-known figures who are rarely placed in the same conversation. The structure of the book intentionally puts disparate figures and scholarly traditions in conversation with each other. I appreciated how this structure highlighted the many blind spots that conventional categorizations engender. Galvan is challenging the distinctions we make between art and writing, between mainstream and alternative, between feminist and queer. She insists that we notice and take seriously a wide range of visual content; she also insists that where we encounter material—in specific archives, with particular goals—matters; the particular reception communities and archival homes that preserve this material affect our own reception of and understanding of the material.Mainstream culture, for example, doesn’t always place Allison Bechdel within a broader political or aesthetic community, treating her as a solitary genius. Her MacArthur grant, colloquially known as a “genius grant,” praised her “storytelling that is striking for its conceptual depth and complexity in structure as well as for the deft use of allusion and reference,” and argued that “Bechdel is changing our notions of the contemporary memoir and expanding the expressive potential of the graphic form.” Bechdel’s larger feminist and queer community was not mentioned. Galvan’s careful explication of Bechdel’s work for the feminist journal WomaNews makes clear how essential that particular community is to understand the artist she would become, a result of collective values and communal production. Through analysis of Bechdel’s early drawings for WomaNews, Galvan finds in the “image-text contributions” of “covers, advertisements, and graphics accompanying articles” the seeds of her later intersectional work in Dykes to Watch Out For and her archival precision of Fun Home (135). Bechdel’s interest in archives, Galvan argues, “including her precise reproduction of personal family objects,” helps us “to understand Bechdel as ‘the lesbian Norman Rockwell’ in a manner that individual autobiography alone cannot grasp” (118).Conversely, the feminist reception of Gloria Anzaldua has not treated her as a visual artist; Galvan’s work on Anzaldua is similarly revelatory. A “visual praxis,” she argues, gave Anzaldua another means “to welcome others into her thought,” to develop communities around groundbreaking new ideas” (144). Visual work, which she developed alongside her better-known editorial and written work, supported the pedagogical and democratic impulses of her intersectional feminism. Galvan shows us how these images reappear and evolved in her public presentations, from “the drawings she made in classroom notes” to those she “created on transparencies for public talks [that] had extended use” (149). I look forward to sharing these visual elements the next time I teach Anzaldua.I was also taken with Galvan’s work on photographer Nan Goldin, who has not always been centered in histories of a controversial AIDS exhibition, despite organizing it. Galvan gives us a view of an alternate reception of her work by emphasizing her larger career as a photographer and ties her feminist commitments to her later coalition with queer artists with AIDS; the two, in Galvan’s telling, are inseparable. By connecting her work to the exhibition Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (1989–90), Galvan draws clear connections between feminist and queer aesthetic protest movements that too often get discussed separately.These considerations are all driven by a nuanced, metacritical understanding of the materiality of archives. Mainstream culture has overlooked most of these artistic traditions, and only their preservation in various archives has allowed Galvan to map out this essential genealogy of queer and feminist activist aesthetics. Modeling how to analyze and understand key images within broader intellectual and ideological contexts, Galvan also takes care to address the cost of time and money to visit such archives; the differences in access given what kind of archive houses the material, from community archives to public libraries to special collections at private libraries (79). Paying attention both to what the material suggests and where and how we access, Galvan models a collaborative, ethical scholarship, doing so through with a thoughtful incorporation of theorists of archives, Kate Eichorn and Ann Cvetkovitch.Galvan argues persuasively that art is integral to a complete understanding of the figures in her study—and broader feminist and queer movements as well.Invisible Archives corrects a blind spot in histories of feminist and queer activism and will become an essential book for future surveys.