Comics, visual culture, and feminism in the 1980s
I'm just always sort of rooting from the margins, but also thinking about what the margins have to tell us and how folks on the margins are replicated in all these sort of different ways in comics, but also, in other discourses too.
Ramzi Fawaz:Because, like, the book itself is like a conceptual sequence of feminist interventions into the 1980s.
Anna Peppard:What voices have been left out of the history of comics? Why have these voices been left out of the history of comics?
Margaret Galvan:Hello, everyone. This is Margaret Galvin. I'm here to talk with you today about my book, my very first book, Invisible Archives, Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the nineteen eighties. In short, this book is my love letter to eight visual artists who celebrate women's bodies and sexualities, and it encompasses a decade's worth of research in over a dozen archives across The US. And I have here with me today, very generously, Anna Peppard.
Margaret Galvan:I'm very excited to talk with her. Her 2020 book, Super Sex, is an edited collection about superheroes and sexuality, and it just came out again in paperback. It's super fantastic, touchpoint for a lot of folks. And then there's, Ramsey Fawaz, who last year came out with queer forms, a really beautiful book that talks about comics and other sorts of visual forms and thinks about different ways that they connect to ideas of queer sexuality and activism. So I'm very excited to talk with both of these folks today about my book.
Margaret Galvan:You'll hear a bit from them, and then we'll dig in.
Anna Peppard:Hi. Yeah. I'm so thrilled to be here. So excited to talk more with you about this fabulous book. And I thought I'd just start by praising the title, a plus title, wonderful title.
Anna Peppard:The dual meaning of it is just perfect for the thesis of your book. Yeah. I'm just eager to talk about it a little bit more with you.
Ramzi Fawaz:It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I have been so lucky to follow the progress of this project over a number of years, and seeing it kind of come to fruition is so enriching. Before we dive in, I think something I'd like to let the audience know is that Invisible Archives is really a book about communion. It looks at a particular historical moment, the nineteen eighties, when communion between women and queer people variously construed was under extraordinary strain coming out of this beautiful rich moment in the seventies of organizing around gay and feminist liberation.
Ramzi Fawaz:What we have in the nineteen eighties with the rise of Reaganism, the backlash against feminism, HIV AIDS, and the feminist sex wars is a moment when all of these hard won alliances among gender and sexual outlaws seemed in danger of completely unraveling. And what Margaret is really doing in this book is saying that visual culture was one place where that communion between gender and sexual outlaws was fought for, was visualized, was imagined to continue onward in the face of extraordinary violence and, also internal conflict. And so something that really surprised me as a reader seeing the final product was how deeply committed the book is in our own present moment where there is so much internal conflict on the left and also conflict between political conservatism and progressivism. The book is so committed to the idea that art and culture is the place where we can convene and come together. So I'm really excited to talk about that, and I wanted to kind of start by saying that because I want audiences to know that, like, that's what you're gonna get when you read this book.
Ramzi Fawaz:It's not just a study of different visual forms, but really a study about the politics of communion in the late twentieth century.
Margaret Galvan:Thanks so much for that. I guess I'm always sort of internally an optimist, but really interested in affinity between groups and how also artists were creating community with their artwork and both representing community, in the artwork, but also trying to find ways to disseminate and share their artwork in ways that would build community and bring people together, especially because a lot of times, as you say, they're depicting, lesbians or bisexual women or queer folks in general or women of color, a lot of identities that hadn't gotten a lot of visual play. And so they were really trying to make these things visible and find ways to bring people into community, when they say, hey. Look. This this is a space for me.
Anna Peppard:Can I ask you a question, Margaret, about the specific forms that you choose to focus on and, like, related to that question of community and visibility and all of these wonderful themes that are so crucial to your book? I mean, you talk about comicality, sort of the comic like elements of all these different types of works that you discuss. And you discuss collage, you discuss the drawings of Anzaldua, you discuss comics, you discuss all of these different things, like photography, obviously, as well in your final chapter. I mean, for you, what were sort of the common elements of all these different forms that made you wanna put them in communion with each other? You know, why were these forms so essential to building these types of communities to speaking back to some of the invisibility that these forms are are sort of trying to intervene in?
Margaret Galvan:Thanks for that. I mean, one thing I'm thinking about is sort of, like, visual print forms. This is not a high art things that you'll necessarily find in gallery spaces, but forms that would circulate in newspapers and activist spaces that would be associated with activism. And so that was sort of the space that I was thinking of to find these forms and then thinking about from from someone who has long sort of taught and read and studied comics, thinking about ways of reading the images. I think about them.
Margaret Galvan:Not that they are comics, but think about them in ways that one reading comics would think about them. So thinking about relationships between image and text, thinking a lot about sequences of images, thinking about spaces of multiplicity. Some of these ideas also really sort of come from discourses in the last several years about queer forms in comics and thinking about how queer people make comics, but how so how comics can be queer. And so thinking about some of these different formal characteristics and thinking about them across different visual formats. When I'm looking at photographs, I'm thinking about photos and captions, but photos in sequence with each other, both across the page and within the book.
Margaret Galvan:Also, in thinking about image and text together, one of the things I love about that is, you know, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, but often, whose words are those? And for these women, those words are their own. The words that are used to interpret the images are the ones that are on the page, their own words. And so I think that's a really powerful thing that something is offered to us by the comics form is the sort of the interplay between text and image.
Anna Peppard:Can I ask you a follow-up question that I think would bring Ramsay back into the conversation as well? Because, obviously, his theorizations of the potential queerness of comics and, like, ideas like queer mutanity and all of these wonderful things that a bunch of his work talks about made me think about how we've all, some of us anyway, have been engaged in a process in sort of the last, what, ten years of comic studies maybe, of trying to rethink the history of this form and try to rethink some of what we know formally about this form, sort of in conversation with how the history of comics has been told. And I really responded a lot to the way your book is part of that conversation. You know, what voices have been left out of the history of comics? Why have these voices been left out of the history of comics?
Anna Peppard:How can the ways that these marginalized voices have experimented with the comics forum help us rethink comics? And I know I'm talking a lot about comics here because comics is kind of my background. So I particularly responded to sort of some of those elements in the book. Of course, I don't want people to get the impression that it's only about comics because you talk about so many things. But, yeah, I was wondering to what extent did you think of your book as trying to speak back to some of those sort of exclusions in something like the field of comic studies in which a number of these voices, a number of these creators have been underrepresented up to now.
Margaret Galvan:That's definitely the goal, to think about what's been underrepresented and why, or there are moments when I talk about underground comics and women in underground comics. And that's gotten a lot of attention more recently owing to sort of the work of Trina Robbins as a comics historian, also owing to Hilary Schutz' book, Graphic Women. But even now, it's underrepresented or seen as the margins of underground comics, whereas someone like Robert Crumb, is sort of at the center still. And so even just the way we tell that history, the women sort of get left off to the side. And so one of the things I was interested in is why that is and how we see that happening and how these comics are archived and saved and how collections of comics that collectors have put together sort of position these women at the margins and what we can do when we understand that.
Margaret Galvan:I'm just always sort of rooting from the margins, but also thinking about what the margins have to tell us and how folks on the margins are replicated in all these sort of different ways in comics, but also, in other discourses too because there's a lot of just work that doesn't get picked up, not only by not by comic studies, but doesn't get picked up by women's studies, gender and sexuality studies. So there's a whole big discourse about grassroots periodicals, and the periodicals are so very, very visual. And that doesn't get as talked about as much as it should, and so that's part of what I'm aiming to do here as well.
Ramzi Fawaz:No. I wanted to jump in because I wanna observe that, you know, I wanna scale outward from Anna's really great question, and I wanna return to comics. In a sense, I wanna use Anna's question to jump to something, like, really at a meta level about the book and then come back to comics so that we can all geek out about them. But I think in a sense, your commitment to studying what some people might think of as a marginal medium and marginalized people within that medium. Right?
Ramzi Fawaz:Comics is already thought of as disposable trash, etcetera. And then you're also talking about women and queer people within the production of comics media who are doubly marginalized within that field. But I would say that the entire project is also committed to recuperating a variety of marginal subjects. Right? So I wanna name what some of those are.
Ramzi Fawaz:The book on the surface, like, if you just look at the book, looks like a study of eight feminist women artists, writers, thinkers, teachers who are also tend towards being lesbian or bisexual. It arranges an archive of women doing really, really innovative work, but then within marginalized mediums, comics, collage work, zines, etcetera. So there's two layers. Women, lesbians, bisexual women, queer women. There are the art forms that they look at or that they create.
Ramzi Fawaz:You know, we I've named some of them comics, zines, collage, etcetera. You're also looking at archives where all of this work, which is largely out of print, are stored. And archives are thought of as kind of marginal to a lot of contemporary scholars who wanna look at digital media that's out in the world. And archives are thought of as kind of, like, musty and old and, like, who wants to go? Right?
Ramzi Fawaz:Like, this is kind of like we think of it as the space of the older historian. You're also looking at gay and feminist social movements that have often been relegated to the dust bin of history by contemporary social movements. And you're looking at a period that is largely hated by the left, right, the nineteen eighties, this period of backlash of Reaganism, of the rise of neoliberalism. I would love for you to tell us a little bit about how you came to connect all of those different, I'm calling the marginal phenomenon, ideas, people, medium into this story where you say, actually, all of these things are connected, and all of them have something to tell us about the way we do politics today. Like, I'm interested in you reconstructing how you connected all those things that most people turn their eyes away from.
Margaret Galvan:Well, that's a huge question. When I started on this work, the discourses of feminism are always so focused on the seventies. The seventies is the area of focus. Not always, but that's sort of, like, the center of the discourse. And then we have queer theory, which emerges in, like, sort of the early nineties.
Margaret Galvan:There's this gap there in the center, the eighties. And so that was one of my, like, primary moments of thinking, well, what happens in the eighties? And and what happens in the eighties? It gets paid attention to, but not enough is, a lot of gay and lesbian solidarity around HIV and AIDS, but there's also a lot of lesbian feminists, doing some really amazing work. And this gets attention to a certain extent.
Margaret Galvan:I mean, certainly someone I talk about, Gloria Anzaldua, her brand of, like, Chicana feminism, Borderlands, and This Bridge Called My Back, those were both major releases in the eighties and still very popular today. But there was also just all of this even her drawings that she did just were sort of underseen. And so I was interested in this period just because it just doesn't get discussed as much. I saw it as this period where both queer discourse and feminist discourse were meshing or melding together, and one was sort of evolving into the other. And so I really wanted to go there.
Margaret Galvan:I really wanted to also think about this period of social difficulty where you had the ascendancy of a lot of social movements, but then it became something that was difficult. And so how did artists sort of contend with that, and how did artists create work against censorship? And I I think that's always been something that was of interest to me. And so there was a lot of different spaces of social movements, spaces of activism happening in this period that it gave me a lot to look at. I think that's sort of the beginning of the answer to your question.
Ramzi Fawaz:No. That makes so much sense because one way to think about it is that you're filling the gutter. Right? Like, the eighties is kind of, like, the gutter between the two panels that tell feminist history as elite from the radical seventies to the third wave of the nineties. And your book in some ways, it is living out the investment you have in comics in that you were saying, I'm gonna fill in that invisible space between those moments.
Ramzi Fawaz:And I think that that's so powerful. And I wanna also just, like, remind listeners a little bit about some of the people that you write about. Right? You write about some classic comics creators like Alison Bechdel and her early work and how she developed this visual lexicon of all of these different lesbian types in her early artwork. You write about Gloria Anzaldua and the way in which she drew so many of her theories into her slideshows and her talks and in the marginal writing of her notebooks.
Ramzi Fawaz:You look at the photographic work of Nan Goldin. So you kind of assemble an archive of visual artists in the eighties, which then becomes its own like, your book is it's like its own comic book, its own comics sequential comic about the feminist eighties. And I think that's kind of what's incredible is that you model the type of cultural politics that you're invested in in the structure of the book. And I think that returns us to Anna's question about your investment in comics because, like, the book itself is like a conceptual sequence of feminist interventions into the nineteen eighties.
Anna Peppard:Yeah. I got that impression as well. I mean, what I was thinking about as you were posing that question, Ramsey, and as Margaret was so eloquently answering it, was how it reminded me of collage as well. Because when we were talking a little bit before the podcast, I was talking about how I particularly responded to the first chapter about the collage activists and sort of some of the arguments that you made there having to do with the multiple interpretations afforded when we do things like take stills from pornography out of context and add text to them and in a sense, make them very much like a comic and the way that we can take theories of reading comics and apply them to that kind of thing and both enrich comic studies and enrich this work that has been underrepresented as we've been talking about throughout this conversation so far. But it struck me as your entire book being a bit collage like in that you're comparing and contrasting these different creators, these different mediums, these different moments, these different contexts, and inviting your readers to draw connections to them, but, you know, not being prescriptive about the connections that we might draw.
Anna Peppard:I mean, I was wondering how intentional that was in terms of your choice of which things to kind of combine here. And I'll leave that question open for you in terms of how you made the choices of what to combine. Maybe that's not a good word.
Ramzi Fawaz:Well, in a sense, juxtapose.
Anna Peppard:Juxtapose is good.
Ramzi Fawaz:I think that the the book is very much a project of juxtaposition. You're putting really unlikely figures together and saying to the reader, actually, you can trace a lineage of feminist visual politics through this group of women who you would never have thought to put together before. And, like, here, let me show you.
Anna Peppard:And then, you know, as readers, we're kind of doing the work of closure, but a nonprescriptive closure to make sense of those juxtapositions. Right?
Margaret Galvan:Yeah. No. Definitely. I mean, yeah, these people I wanna say they weren't friends, but I don't mean to say they were enemies, but, like, they didn't necessarily all know each other. But you would see them and you would be familiar with all of them if you're reading, like, the gay or lesbian or feminist newspapers at the time.
Margaret Galvan:So sometimes these people would appear side by side. So I talk about in my chapter on Alison Bechdel, there's a moment where there's a comics image by her in a newspaper, and there's a letter on the page that's about This Bridge Called My Back, which had gone out of print, and the editors, Gloria Anzaldu and Sherry Muraga, are trying to bring it back into print. Or there's this famous conference at Barnard College that the artist in the first chapter, Hannah Alde Fehr, Marybeth Nelson, and Beth Jaker, they designed a sort of visual collage program for, which got censored and was a big hullabaloo. It's it's a lot of fun to write about. People in that conference talking about pornography, some of them use photographs by Nan Goldin.
Margaret Galvan:So there are these moments where these historic figures and artists are bumped up against each other, which I think is interesting. And one of the things that's also fun for me, I there's all these little fun detours, sometimes in footnotes, but sometimes in captions, where I try to scale out and think about a lot of the cultural context of the day that would have informed what we're seeing in the visual material. And so there's, you know, a moment where Bechtel has her characters posed like the Rockettes. And I make the connection that, you know, at this time, the Rockettes, which is a dance troupe in New York City that would always do a Christmas show, they were not yet racially integrated. And they were very constrained in terms of their visual appearance, and so it is striking when someone like Alison Bechdel does a visual reference to them, but with a a cast of women who are racially diverse, but also diverse in terms of their bodies, their presentations, all sorts of different ways that they're diverse.
Margaret Galvan:It's sort of a tangent, but it's also sort of the point too because all of these individuals are sort of responding to sort of these rich cultural ways that women were being represented and what they were going to represent instead.
Ramzi Fawaz:Well and I just wanna say that I think part of what is so compelling about your project is that part of what you're describing and that Anna kind of encouraged you to think about this in terms of juxtaposition is that you're saying the cultural history of radical feminism looks very different when we pay very close attention to the the seemingly local minor juxtapositions, not only of actual activists, like how they were arranged in space and in political activism, but also how those activists and artists, like, juxtaposed or put together their different kinds of artwork in the public sphere. So, like, you're paying very close attention to, like, here's where Alison Bechdel's art appears and on the same page. You know, Gloria Anzaldua's this basement called my back is being mentioned. When you pay that close attention, then you can't make broad, sweeping, generalized claims about feminism as all white or white feminist says never considering the problem of race. You're looking at this stuff and you're saying, actually, a lot of these women were thinking about questions of racial diversity, of sexual diversity, of gender diversity in granular nuanced complicated ways that were really about everyday life.
Ramzi Fawaz:You know, like, Alison Bechdel didn't need to name herself an intersectional feminist to be doing intersectional feminist work. She was just looking around at her friends and lovers and saying, we're not all the same. We don't all look the same. Let me draw our diversity on the page, and you tell the story of what happens when people draw that world. So there's a quote that you have, in the introduction right on page two that was very moving to me about this group of people that you write about.
Ramzi Fawaz:You say their art functions as collective autobiography in how they drew themselves within a larger community and then welcomed others to imagine themselves within that world. That, I think, really encapsulates your project to really go back in time and say, what were the ways in which these activists and artists use their aesthetic skills to welcome people into their world? And it strikes me that that says a lot about contemporary social movements, which often do not welcome people into their worlds, which are often very defensive and very about protecting discrete identities. This is a different story, and I love that about this book.
Margaret Galvan:I mean, definitely. I mean, one thing that you know, whenever you're in an activist movement of any sort, sometimes there's a way in which, there's sort of insider language being developed. I mean, there's probably inside jokes and things that I'm not gonna get or things that are very much of the time period that maybe I overlook or something. You know? No one's analysis can look at everything, but their work even today, which, you know, this is, thirty, forty years on, consistently welcomes people in, and it often was made with the idea of reaching people who were outside of the movement and also not necessarily being hoity toity about, you know, who's farther along in terms of their consciousness raising.
Margaret Galvan:Right? It was about trying to meet people where they were and welcome them in and see them as part of the community. And so that's an ethos that you find across the visual artwork for these artists is, sort of openness. The door is open today as well. I was wondering if we could talk
Anna Peppard:a little bit about the overarching theme of visibility and, you know, related, of course, to archives and related to the work itself that these people are producing. I wanna ask you, like, sort of, like, a basic question, you know, again, for the benefit of people who maybe haven't read the book yet, but, like, why have some of these creators and texts and examples of art and something like the diary that you just talked about from the Barnard sex conference, Why are some of these things not as visible as they should be? I know for my part that Anzaldua, that drawing was so much a part of her practice was something that I really wasn't familiar with despite being, familiar with some of the scholarship. And I know that some of the reasons this stuff isn't as visible as it should be is homophobia and misogyny, like, in terms of who's setting the canons of these fields and these contexts. But I'd love to hear you speak to that a little bit more, you know, like, because I think there are so many different reasons that certain things have not been as visible.
Anna Peppard:I mean, the feminist sex wars is the context for that first chapter, and, you know, certain texts have not been visible because of that infighting between different feminist groups. And in other cases, it's not visible because representing queer identities in the mainstream press wasn't considered acceptable in certain eras. So things are less visible to that mainstream audience because of that. But, yeah, I'd just love to hear you speak a little bit more about why aren't some of these things as visible as they maybe could be or should be? Why has it become necessary to do this work of recovery?
Margaret Galvan:That's definitely something I'm always thinking about. It also makes, teaching some of this material hard because you can't necessarily get it off of your library shelf. A lot of things are published with small press publishers, and so when they go out of print, you have to fight to get them back in print, or they're they're harder to get anyway. Their distribution is gonna be necessarily smaller. So something like This Bridge Called My Back, which a lot of people are familiar with over the course of decades, it's gone into and out of print with, variety of small press publishers.
Margaret Galvan:It's now more consistently in print with SUNY Press, an academic publisher. But some of that is the story of these things falling out of visibility is a story of, you know, the women in print movement not really able to transform or sustain really what it wanted to sustain. So there's a, you know, a great book called The Feminist Bookstore Movement, which really gets into that, which I highly recommend. Some of the stuff, like Laurie Anzaldua, has been very visible, but then she chose not to publish her drawings. They were definitely if you were listening to one of her talks, you would see them.
Margaret Galvan:But it's not until after her death and her archives, are now at UT Austin at the Nettie Lee Benson that her drawings have been seen. Folks are aware of her visuals, but they like to sort of prioritize the text because the text has gotten you know, she's, in some ways, a canonical literary theorist whose work touches a lot of different fields. But in such, there's also a reduction in that, you know, if you're gonna quote Borderlands, people are often quoting the same passages, and so we need to sort of dig beyond what we know of these people. Or someone like Alison Bechdel. People love Fun Home.
Margaret Galvan:There's so much discussion about Fun Home. Back when this was a dissertation, my dissertation director said, well, have you considered writing about Alison Bechdel? And I was like, absolutely not. She's way too popular. But then I realized, well, people haven't really talked about her origins.
Margaret Galvan:What's her origin story? And in some ways, in her own comics, she sort of not that she overlooks it, but she sort of condenses it in ways, and so you really have have to go dig to find it. And so some of this is also just time. Things go out of print. Sometimes artists have something else they're working on.
Margaret Galvan:They don't want to bring them back into print. But at the same time, I think that especially since, unfortunately, we're in a recursive societal moment where, you know, women's rights and LGBTQ rights are threatened again, these things that they were fighting for and these ways that they're trying to build community are still so, so, so very relevant today. You know, you have someone like Nan Goldin, who there's just a a new documentary about her work, all the beauty and the bloodshed. And so a lot of these things now, perhaps you're thinking to yourself, oh, well, yeah, I know who Nan Goldin is, but there is sort of a return to some of these artists and moments. A lot of it may be more familiar to folks than it would be five years ago, unfortunately, because of where we are right now.
Ramzi Fawaz:Well, you know, I think another reason that some of these texts aren't lost to us in this moment, and that's part of the beauty of your book, is not only that you've recovered them, but that you analyze them in such a rich way that it actually makes the reader wanna go find them to find these comics and these zines and these works of collage. First of all, they're difficult and they're conflictual. Like, all of the things that you look at, the comic books of Lee Mars and of and Gregory and the original kind of image text, that the three creators produce around the Barnard conference, these are difficult texts. They are forcing the reader to confront really painful and difficult realities about coming into one's own as a lesbian feminist, as a sexual being, you know, etcetera. Like, they're challenging.
Ramzi Fawaz:When you look at a comic book, Pudge Girl Blimp, that is a very visually complicated comic book. So much is happening in every panel. It's really trying to narrate the complex experience of a young woman coming into her own as bisexual. And I think in some ways, that is at odds with the current moment that we live in, in which people want very fast images that are easy to absorb, that you move through quickly, that don't cause too much distress. There's, like, a desire to really, really avoid conflict, harm, pain, difficulty.
Ramzi Fawaz:And I think part of what I love about all the text that you look at is that they're they're forcing readers to face complex difficult realities as well as the pleasures of being a lesbian feminist. So, I mean, it strikes me that that might also be why they have kind of gone out of vogue is, like, they require a lot of time and attention, which is what your book is a model
Margaret Galvan:of. Well, I wonder if
Anna Peppard:we could, like, relate that to current I hesitate to even say debates because that makes it seem like there's an equality to the quote unquote sides here, but, like, I was thinking a lot about dynamics of censorship, you know, again, particularly in that first chapter, although it's something that can be applied to other chapters as well. You know, the ways that there's this infighting between different groups of feminists with some of them being very resistant to imperfect subjects, sort of what they're judging as being imperfect subjects, you know, sort of like an imperfect to their minds, you know, in terms of the anti porn feminist, an imperfect way of being sexual and imperfect way of being gendered. Right. And it reminds me so much of some of the things that's going on now with, like, the quote, unquote, gender critical folks, the turf folks looking for these kinds of essentialist perfect subjects. So it sort of conjured that to me.
Anna Peppard:It also conjured a bunch of the book banning discourses that have been going on, which have been particularly hard on something like comics, something like genderqueer, right, has been particularly singled out in part because of the, I would say, joint power and quote unquote danger of the images. And it made me think a lot too, just even going back to the very beginnings of comic censorship with something like Frederick Wortham. Right? Which I know as comic scholars, we're all bored of talking about Wortham and please let's not spend any more time on him than we have to. But one of the things that seemed to particularly bother him and bothered a lot of sort of the anti comics crusaders in the nineteen fifties was the multiplicity of comics was sort of the agency that they afford readers to read Batman and Robin as gay if they want to, to sort of perceive the sapphic undertones or perhaps overtones of the Marston Peter Wonder Woman comics.
Anna Peppard:Right. And how threatening that readerly agency was to the people trying to censor and ban these things. And when I was reading that first chapter, like having to do with the feminist sex wars and how threatened sort of the anti porn feminist seemed to be by that multiplicity that was encouraged by the collages in, in the diary. And I just thought of how relevant some of those engagements with why people feel the desire to censor and why there's this sort of infighting and why these types of images and ways of representation tend to be both extremely powerful and extremely, quote, unquote, dangerous, again, depending on the perspective of who's looking. And, yeah, I was wondering if you if you thought of some of those contemporary sort of resonances as as you were looking at some of that work and and thinking through some of those debates.
Margaret Galvan:Definitely. And, unfortunately, more and more so recently in our sort of current environment. With chapter one, there's these anti porn feminists. Not to be reductive of them, but one of the things a number of the groups would do would do these slide shows where they'd show these pornographic images, and they'd have and I talk about this in book, and they would tell the audience what they meant. Right?
Margaret Galvan:And then they would lead people into these. Sometimes if they're in, like, Times Square, they would do tours of the peep shows and things like that, which tell you how you should feel about it. Right? As if anyone has or any group of people is all gonna have the same interpretation or feelings about these things and feelings about this world that they may have had no prior knowledge or experience of. Right?
Margaret Galvan:This may be something completely new to them. You know, in Canada, they did end up enacting restrictions in terms of what crosses the border. And so especially in the period after this one in the nineties, a lot of comics that are depicting, like, sexual just even sexuality in general are in danger of getting sort of stopped at the border as sort of porn or obscene. And so there are very real ways in which a lot of this discourse makes it difficult for other artwork to thrive, to circulate, to build community, especially across borders. But the first chapter and also the last chapter, I really sort of deal with censorship and art sort of created against censorship or created to sort of defy and wanting to make the community visible.
Margaret Galvan:So someone like Nan Goldin is photographing her friends and lovers, her community of sexual liberation. And, originally, it's to make everyone visible, but then it takes on sort of a more poignant tone when a lot of those folks end up getting HIV and AIDS and dying. And then she as I talk about in the book, she organizes this exhibit called witnesses against her vanishing, and then the exhibit itself is threatened because of the way in which an artist, David Von Robich, challenges the politics of the moment and challenges Jesse Helms and challenges religious assholes like Cardinal O'Connor. So there is a way in which this art sort of speaks back, very forcefully to censorship and insists upon visibility and also insists upon you know, we've talked a lot about marginality and how these are marginal subjects, but in some ways, ours are also insisting upon these experiences as universal, as not particular, as not parochial, as not local, but as something that can be larger than the sort of local community it depicts or represents. And that's one of the things that I think is sort of powerful to think about.
Margaret Galvan:Anna, we were talking about this idea of histories of sexuality or of women, especially in comics still today, are often seen as sort of sidebars or ancillary or nice additions to an anthology or a conference panel, and then the rest of the folks can merrily go along and just talk about straight white men. I mean, that's not exactly what you said. It's a little reductive. But so that's one of the things that, you know, I was thinking about is prioritizing or recentering these individuals as, universal and is speaking to sort of universal experiences as well in this period.
Anna Peppard:That's so well said. Thanks for that.
Ramzi Fawaz:Speaking of exactly that, I think one of the arguments of your book is that one of the ways that really particular local intimate experiences that people have, let's say of lesbian of a particular version of lesbian sexuality, can only be translated to people who are different or who have different desires by kind of creating visual analogies. Like, you suggest throughout the book that part of what's so powerful about image text combinations of people doing kind of hybrid media, photography that's captioned and put into a slideshow, comic strips that makes word and image and seriality is that it allows creators to kind of give literal shape or form to a certain kind of experience and then share it. So one of my favorite examples of the book of this, which I've heard you speak about in talks, but then when I saw you do the analysis, I was just blown away. You read this amazing moment in the comics artist Lee Mars's The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge Girl Blimp, this, like, late nineteen seventies, '19 eighties comic book in which she visually describes what it is like for a young bisexual woman to enter the space of a feminist consciousness raising circle in which a group of women are sitting talking to each other about their experiences of sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and it's a spiral.
Ramzi Fawaz:You say if something really unusual happens, you see comic book panels spiraling inward in this very complicated movement. And then you say what's amazing about this spiral is it's describing what it feels like to be getting all of these different perspectives from different women. It's vertiginous. It makes you feel vertigo, but it's also open ended and leaves all of these possibilities for different conversations to go in different directions and kind of indefinitely. So I would love for you to talk a little bit more about, like, what exactly is the link between making visual analogies to social relationships and those actual relationships.
Ramzi Fawaz:Because in a sense, one of the arguments of your book is that the social communion between different kinds of people, different kinds of women, queer people, genders, you know, races, etcetera, is, like, analogous to the way some of these artists make images and texts and other media commune on the page. So, like, what is the link between aesthetic multimedia multimodality and social relating?
Margaret Galvan:Yeah. It's a great question. One of the things these works are not all autobiographical in a way, but this work is definitely influenced by autobiography theory and thinking about not that you can sort of just dynamically relate things as they are, but we sort of construct stories about ourselves or in the case of all of these works, stories about our communities. And so there's a way in which all of these women are interested in documenting social relations, right, on the page and but not just showing them how they are, but then in sort of editing or reformulating how they wanna show them. For someone like Lee Mars, she has these spirals sort of suggesting you know, it's it makes it really hard to read the page.
Margaret Galvan:And in general, her work is just very thick with visual annotations with text. It sort of is disruptive to the comics page. Even when you don't have a spiral, you're often confronted in a page with what do I read first, what do I read next, what is the order of things. And I think that sort of what do I do now. It's like when one is sort of entering into the space of a new social movement and being bombarded or not knowing how to move through the space.
Margaret Galvan:And so there's a way in which she uses these forms to echo what it would be like for a newcomer entering into the space. So there's a almost like a didactic approach to it. But I'm also thinking of someone like Nan Goldin. Her photographs, when she has them in a book or in she used to show them as slideshows, they're not in the order in which she took them and she's not trying to, you know, here's my slideshow of my summer vacation or something. No.
Margaret Galvan:It's like, here's the people who matter in my life, but now let me put them into new orders and new relationships that may not echo the relationships in the real world, but will tell us something deeper about these people, but also the identities they represent, whether that be, you know, something homosocial or she's very influenced early on by sort of a community of trans women and drag queens and thinks a lot about her own gender and her own sexuality as a bisexual woman in relationship to these women. And so there's a, in some ways, documentary or preservation impulse to record and to save, but then I'll impulse to some how communicate about the relationships between these individuals and how they're always sort of shifting or always sort of in movement between individuals. Those are some of the things I'm thinking about in terms of the ways that they are trying to shape different visual analogies or ways that they're playing with forms. You know, Nan Goldin is famously known for her color photography. It doesn't seem like a big deal today, but when you see most things in black and white, and black and white is the way to elevate and make something seem proper, and she shows us things in full color, I mean, that's a slap in the face.
Margaret Galvan:And so some of this too is remembering the time period in which these things were created and what was there in the water of sort of the social relationships between these individuals.
Anna Peppard:In the interest of sort of talking about the further life of your book or how you would like your book to participate in intervening in existing discourses or, you know, pointing a way towards a future of doing different types of analysis differently, I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to how we can continue to make some of these texts, some of these creators, some of these ways of seeing even more visible, because you talked at various points throughout the book, of course, about the difficulty of so many of these works being located in archives that aren't always accessible to the public that aren't always literally visible to the public because people aren't aware of them. And you ask the wonderful question toward the end of the book, you know, how do we, I'm paraphrasing, I'm sure I'm gonna get it wrong, but how do we know who to Google? How do we know what to look up? How do we know what we should be looking for? Because that's the nature of a visibility, right?
Anna Peppard:People don't even know to look for it. How do we make these things more visible? Like, what are some of the practical things that if there are practical things that you would like to see happen to make some of these texts, some of these creators, some of these discourses more visible to more people?
Margaret Galvan:So in the conclusion, I do talk a little bit about doing Wikipedia recovery projects with my students, which is one sort of, like, nuts and bolts thing where I go through and find, in this case, lists of names of queer cartoonists who either not represented at all on Wikipedia or represent in, like, a very short entry and have my students go through and improve or create Wikipedia entries for them so that can serve as, like, a basis for someone else to do further research. But that also involves me then collecting this material and encouraging my library to collect this material so I can share it with the students so that they're able to do this research because it's not necessarily in the library otherwise. What's helped in the last several years and also sort of got sped up a little bit by the pandemic is there has been a move to digitize some of this material, but I think we have to be careful about the ethics of digitization and what exposing an artist to a a larger community than they ever meant to be a part of. There is a question there, so there has to be sort of a thoughtful effort.
Margaret Galvan:I think there is room to republish some of this work. But I think one of the things is to, you know, make people aware of these communities and aware of how to look for them and where to find them. I don't have all the practical answers, unfortunately. But in some ways, if this book wants to or I want to encourage people to continue to look, I do love digital culture and digital research and digital forms, but I think I'm very much invested in sort of, like, the throwback, the analog, the obsolete, or the things that are considered to be those things. I would love to get more people into the archives.
Margaret Galvan:I do realize that there's privilege to going into archives, but there's often in a lot of towns, a lot of places, there are local historical societies. There are, lots of spaces or older individuals with personal collections that they'd love to share with people. There are archives everywhere wanting to welcome people in if we'd only start to go look for them.
Anna Peppard:Can I ask you just a brief follow-up to ask you to talk just a little bit more about that ethical issue? Because you talked so eloquently throughout the book about the way that particular archives work, the ways that they bring together certain marginalized feminist and queer materials and the ways that they combine those materials in these specific types of spaces and everything is so important to the meaning that those works acquire. It's so important to the community identity of these works to have them located in the community that owns them. So, I mean, what are the risks if we take that thing out of that space and put it in a generic university archive in which we're sort of losing some of that context? Like, does that speak to some of those ethical concerns a little bit?
Margaret Galvan:Yeah. A little bit. In my chapter on Anzaldua, I talk a lot about this amazing digital project that Maria Coterra does called Chicana Pomiraza, where they have digitized materials and documents from Chicana feminists from the sixties, seventies, and eighties and have them on this repository. But one of the things is they digitize and then they leave it in place so the women continue to have the archives in their homes. They're not sort of taken from their homes, the materials.
Margaret Galvan:But then, also, if you want to research and build on that work, you have to become part of the community. So you're not exploiting the work. Right? And there's actually been a lot of really beautiful research. There's a whole volume.
Margaret Galvan:I I think it's called Chicano Moridas based on a lot of this research. You know, even if it's online, it doesn't necessarily need to be accessible to all. Or, you know, a lot of times when you go into, queer or feminist archives, there are some where if you're researching a certain collection, they ask you, well, some of the stuff can't be published on or, you know, you have to have a conversation with the person who worked on the collection to sort of talk to them about what your own positionality is as a researcher. And I think there is a space to build more of these things. Like, in the lesbian history archives, when you deposit, you can say something like, hey.
Margaret Galvan:I don't want you know, I only want other self described lesbians to see my materials. You know, that's one of the things to think about as there's a drive to make things more public or more visible is how can we build in these safeguards to protect these communities, especially at moments when these communities are increasingly under attack again.
Anna Peppard:What was the biggest surprise that you encountered while doing research for this book? Was there something that particularly, like, you thought you were gonna find one thing, you were surprised by what you found, it sort of took you off in another direction, did anything like that happen as you were doing the research?
Margaret Galvan:I think one of the things I was sort of looking through these women's work and just to see the wealth of visual culture around them that we really don't talk about as much as we should. In some ways, this book is like the tip of an iceberg, and there's just you know, the archives is always about excess, and there's just more and more and more that one could delve into or look at. You know, you're looking at a certain artist, but then there's all these other artists around them. And so to think about how rich the visual world was for these women. You know, we're in a moment now where there's lots of, you know, memes and images, and and we're in a different sort of moment of rich visual culture.
Margaret Galvan:And we do remember some of these moments of visual culture, but there's just so much more here and so much creativity. And so I was really just inspired by, you know, the artistic praxis of all of these individuals. And, also, in some ways, I talk about them in relationship to individual forms, but I think it's also important to remember as artists, they move between different forms. So I try to get some of that, fluidity or multiplicity in my discussion of the artists, throughout the book and prioritize hearing their voices talking about using what they said about their art as the springboard for my own analysis, but just, you know, was continuously blown away by all of their artwork and sort of the rich visual world in which they worked and lived.
Ramzi Fawaz:What would be your message to contemporary social movement activists? What is the story that you would want them to take? In many ways, I think that you end in the epilogue beautifully with an argument about the value of archives, what you were just saying of the analog of going back to the things that have been thrown away. But I'd love to hear you take the role that you're allowed to take, which is after this huge, beautiful, meticulous study. What would you say to contemporary social movement activists that they should pay attention to moving forward?
Margaret Galvan:Go into the community archives and often, especially since this stuff doesn't necessarily always make it into university archives, also some of it does the social movement stuff. Go and look at the movement materials. Talk to an older activist and see if they'll share not only their story, but also the artwork of the movement around them and see what lessons there are to be learned. I mean, there's often not to say that everything's been done before, but there's often all of these tactics and responses and ways to intervene and ways to sort of think about these things and ways to build community that I think are really relevant here and really can sort of be used. I, in some ways, wish I had access or knew about all the stuff when I was even younger than I am now.
Margaret Galvan:Even just the comics, going into comic shops when I was young, it was just a space of a lot of men's comics. But knowing what I know now and knowing how women's comics in some ways weren't allowed or were sort of marginalized in those spaces, I encourage people to find community and then also to make connections across generations and ask those individuals, you know, while they're still here with us, about their lives and their art and about their own personal collections of materials because those archives exist. And they may be invisible, but they are there.
Ramzi Fawaz:That's beautiful. That's lovely. Thank you.
Anna Peppard:I've enjoyed this conversation so much, Margaret. It was great hearing you expand on some of the things that were already wonderful in the book. What a privilege for us to have direct access to you to to talk about this wonderful book after having read it.
Ramzi Fawaz:Absolutely. Thank you for including us.
Margaret Galvan:I'm super excited. This is of course my first book. So thank you for helping me start talking about the book.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Invisible Archives, Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.