New Books In Critical Theory

In In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (U Minnesota Press, 2023), Margaret Galvan explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones—the feminist sex wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the women in print movement, and countercultural grassroots periodical networks—and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. She goes deep into the records to bring together a decade’s worth of research in grassroots and university archives that include comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other image-text media produced by women, including Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson, Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin. Through all of this, Galvan documents the community networks that produced visual culture, analyzing how this material provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities. The art highlighted in In Visible Archives demonstrates how women represented their bodies a