City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 6-2016 Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture Margaret A. Galvan Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1248 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ARCHIVING THE ’80s: FEMINISM, QUEER THEORY, & VISUAL CULTURE by MARGARET GALVAN A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2016 © 2016 MARGARET GALVAN All Rights Reserved ii Archiving the ’80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture by Margaret Galvan This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ___________________ _________________________________ Date Nancy K. Miller Chair of Examining Committee ___________________ _________________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Kandice Chuh David Gerstner Hillary Chute THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Archiving the ’80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture by Margaret Galvan Advisor: Nancy K. Miller Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual rather than merely literary output, I explore the overlooked role of visual culture in feminist and LGBT social justice movements. In the first chapter, I review the transition period from the 1970s through the comics work of Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. Their early comics demonstrate the limitations of 1970s feminism, and I analyze how they develop their critiques in the 1980s in newly created comics series like Gay Comix (1980-1998). In the second chapter, I reconfigure the legacy of cartoonist Alison Bechdel as a grassroots activist through analyzing her participation as production coordinator of multiple grassroots periodicals across the 1980s. The third chapter resituates Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa as a visual thinker and examines how she fuses race and sexuality in drawings that she would use to illustrate her own talks. I consider iv the importance of visual discourse to women of color feminism by evaluating the changing visual material in each version of her famed anthology, This Bridge Called My Back (1981, 1983, 2002, 2015). In the fourth chapter, I scrutinize the evolving politics of photographer Nan Goldin in her well known The Ballad of Sexual Dependency slideshow and in her little-discussed curation of the controversial AIDS exhibit, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (1989). Through these artists’ visual production, I argue that the visual offers a more capacious form of feminism that embraces diversity, especially around issues of sexuality. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Because this dissertation relies on archival research for its main contributions, there are a lot of moving parts to this work and a lot of people, places, funding sources to thank for their contributions to making this work possible. I would like to thank: • my dissertation committee, Nancy K. Miller, Kandice Chuh, David Gerstner, and Hillary Chute, and faculty members who shaped and supported this work along the way, including Jonathan W. Gray, Duncan Faherty, Mario DiGangi, Carrie Hintz, and Steven Kruger. Thanks especially to Nancy K. Miller for her constant encouragement and for sharing materials from her own personal archives and to Jonathan W. Gray for our many, formative conversations on how to do scholarly research on comics. • the sources of grant funding that made this research possible, including the Gloria Anzaldúa Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS)-Benson Latin American Collection Short-Term Research Fellow from the University of Texas at Austin (2013), two Doctoral Student Research Grants (2012-2013, 2014-2015), and three Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) Knickerbocker Awards for Archival Research in American Studies (2013, 2014, 2015). Thanks to CMAS for inviting me back to the University of Texas at Austin in 2015 to speak at the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa conference, which allowed me to conduct further research and make personal connections that will direct the future of my work on Anzaldúa. Thanks also to Duncan Faherty and those responsible for the ARC Knickerbocker Awards, which not only financially supported a bulk of my research, but also encouraged me to make archives central to my work and supported my professional development in grant writing. vi • the following archives and the archivists there who were crucial to the research process: Lesbian Herstory Archives; ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California; Fales Library at New York University; Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University; university archives at Cal State University, Long Beach; Paul Brians and Lynn R. Hansen comics collections at Washington State University; Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin; Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; Alexander Street Press Underground and Independent Comics Collection; Independent Voices Collection at Reveal Digital; and Queer Zine Archive Project. Thanks particularly to Karen Green for introducing me to the Alexander Street Press collection and for her efforts in collecting comics archives at Columbia University. Thanks also to Polly Thistlethwaite, Shawn(ta) Smith, and Alycia Sellie, the radical archivist-librarians at The Graduate Center, CUNY. • WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly and Archive Journal, which published articles that incorporate work from this dissertation. “Feminism Underground: The Comics Rhetoric of Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory,” which appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of WSQ, contains materials from the first half of Chapter 1. “Archiving Grassroots Comics: The Radicality of Networks & Lesbian Community,” which appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Archive Journal, incorporates writing from the first few pages of Chapter 2. Thanks to the editors, staff, and peer reviewers of these journals for their work in honing my language, and personal thanks to Julie Enszer, Sam Meier, Meredith Benjamin, Melina Moore, and Matthew Glass for their comments and suggestions on drafts of these articles. vii • those involved in comics scholarship, who have been important interlocutors, facilitating connections to comics artists and comics materials. Thanks to Jonathan W. Gray, Hillary Chute, Karen Green, Sam Meier, Leah Misemer, Ramzi Fawaz, Bill Kartalopoulos, and Michele Hardesty. • the educational technology communities I have been a part of through my Instructional Technology Fellowship (ITF) and OpenCUNY. Thanks to Joseph Ugoretz who has overseen my ITF work and to my fellow ITFs who hail from disparate disciplines and have honed the interdisciplinarity of my thought. Special thanks to my OpenCUNY family, Gregory Donovan, Laurie Hurson, and Christina Nadler; building a participatory digital platform with you has shaped so much of my thought about the importance of grassroots networks. • my colleagues at The Graduate Center, CUNY, who have engaged my work at the conceptual and sentence-level, including Leah Souffrant, Jen Jack Gieseking, Tracy Riley, Matthew Knip, Anne Donlon, Jared Simard, Livia Woods, Velina Manolova, Ian Foster, Ashley Foster, Anne McCarthy, Mia Chen, Kiran Mascarenhas, and Seth Stewart. Particular thanks to Meredith Benjamin and Melina Moore, who have provided invaluable writing and personal support in our M3 grouplet over the past year. Continual thanks goes to Amanda Licastro, my sounding board and life-line. • my friends, including many of the aforementioned colleagues, who have provided necessary levity and balance. Many thanks here to Joanna Tsai, Matthew Glass, Heather Pennington, Chelsea Salem, and Daniel Rojas. viii • my family, who are always there at the end of the phone line or cross-country plane trip and who have sustained my research. Thanks to my mom for driving me to various archives and for helping me select the camera that’s been invaluable to my research process. Thanks to my dad for his engineering ethos that practically grounds my work and for his spot-on software conversations. Thanks to my older sister, Tina, who has always shown me the path forward. Thanks to all three of them for their varied arts practices that sustain them in their careers and that have inspired my thoughts on the matter. Thanks also to my sister’s family, who have brought more love to my life. • my grandmothers for their resilience. Thanks to my dad’s mom, one of the first female Marines, who shared her arts practices with me. Thanks to my mom’s mom,