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

Comics studies spends a lot of time talking about what comics studies is, might be, or should be. Many of these conversations are insular and well-rehearsed. This includes ongoing, sometimes heated debates about terminology (Comics? Graphic novels? Visual narratives?) and tribal divides between the study of brightly colored punch ’em ups and more defensibly literary fare. But some comics studies scholarship confidently blesses the messiness of the medium as the crux of its dynamism—and its revolutionary potential. Margaret Galvan’s debut monograph, In Visible Archies: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, is such a book. Which is not to suggest Galvan’s monograph is messy. This is, on the contrary, an extremely careful, deliberate, and impeccably researched book, which admirably advances the field by making neglected texts newly visible and illuminating neglected sympathies between contexts and modes of production that have seldom, if ever, been placed in conversation. To the extent Galvan embraces messiness, this is reflected in her refreshing lack of concern surrounding what is or isn’t comics.

Galvan’s primary texts are linked by a broadly shared cultural context as well as a variety of shared representational concerns. They are also linked by their capacity for what Colin Beineke calls “comicity,” that is, the potential to be interpreted—and productively reinterpreted—through a comics studies lens.¹ As Galvan puts it in her introduction: “All these artists embraced how sequence allowed them to create relationships between images and individuals and show how they were on the same page, whether literally, metaphorically, or both” (8). Maybe collage zines, live sketching during a lecture, and photographic slideshows are a kind of comics, maybe not. Maybe this matters, maybe it doesn’t. Within the book at hand, what matters is that these things share with comics certain principles of juxtaposition and multiplicity, as well as accessibility and defiance of binaries and hierarchies. Underscoring these shared heritages and political and artistic affiliations compels a powerful recontextualization of the history and canon of American comics, one that centers the stories the field has too often rendered invisible, namely, feminist stories and queer stories.

Galvan’s book is organized into five chapters bracketed by a substantial introduction and a briefer epilogue. In the very quotable introduction, Galvan describes the paradox of the book’s title as reflecting “the hard-won and narrowly kept conditions of visibility for diverse sexual identities” (1–2). As Galvan notes, these identities remain precarious and have, in fact, experienced increased precarity in recent years, as hard-earned political rights and protections for women and LGBTQ+ folks have been under relentless attack. As such, this book can be read as a history of the present, documenting both bigoted exclusions from on high as well as subtler fractions within feminist and queer communities that continue to reverberate today.

Chapter 1, “The Collage Activists: Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson Frame the Feminist Sex Wars,” examines, as its title suggests, an important flashpoint in the commencement of the feminist sex wars that would cause deep schisms in the American feminist movement. Galvan’s focus is on the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality (1982), the program for Barnard College’s annual Scholar and Feminist conference, which was confiscated and censored by school administrators, as well the landmark essay collection Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography & Censorship (1986), also designed by Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson. Galvan additionally discusses the important role of feminist and LGBTQ+ archives in preserving material like the banned Diary. This emphasizes the collectivism of these texts, whose existence depends both on the initial collectivist act of creation and the collectivist act of preservation. While the feminist sex wars have, of course, been amply recounted elsewhere, Galvan sheds new light on the ideological conflicts at the heart of the battle through her analysis of the Diary and other texts as revolutionary in terms of both content and form. In Galvan’s...