Notes
Introduction
Wilshire, “More Nasty Women’s Humor,” 39.
Sherman, “Sex and the 60-Second Warning,” 110.
Fawaz, “Queer Sequence,” 589.
Beineke, “On Comicity.”
This approach echoes how Bart Beaty puts comics in dialogue with the high art world in Comics versus Art and examines how these art worlds, which are sometimes considered disparate, connect. In this book, I am pointing out how all these various art forms belong to and were produced within the social world of grassroots activism.
Beins, Liberation in Print, 11.
Chute, Graphic Women; Fawaz, New Mutants; Fawaz, “Stripped to the Bone”; Scott and Fawaz, “Introduction.”
Beirne, Lesbians in Television and Text; carrington, Speculative Blackness; Howard, Ugly Differences; Scott, Keeping It Unreal.
Scott and Fawaz, “Queer about Comics”; Abate, Grice, and Stamper, “Lesbian Content and Queer Female Characters”; Halsall and Warren, LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader.
Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art; McCloud, Understanding Comics, 9.
Chute, Graphic Women, 7, 221n20. In Comics versus Art, Bart Beaty also discusses McCloud’s decision to claim these ancient forms as comics, focusing his discussion on the Bayeux Tapestry: “The question of whether the Bayeux Tapestry can meaningfully be considered to be a comic is dependent upon the definition that one chooses to employ. From the standpoint of the Americanists with their emphasis on recurrent characters and word balloons, the Tapestry is self-evidently not a comic. Nonetheless, from more generous perspectives the seventy-metre-long embroidery, which tells the tale of the Norman Conquest of England of 1066 through a combination of words and sequential images, could indeed be meaningfully regarded as a comic” (31).
Fawaz, “Stripped to the Bone,” 338, 362.
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 22.
Gregory, Dynamite Damsels.
Gregory, 4.
Chute, Graphic Women, 11.
Piepmeier, Girl Zines, 18.
Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings; Eichhorn, Archival Turn in Feminism.
Caswell, “‘Archive’ Is Not an Archives,” par. 3.
Sellie et al., “Interference Archive,” 461.
Heresies Collective, “Editorial,” 3.
Eichhorn, Archival Turn in Feminism, 3.
Eichhorn, x.
I have had a chance to learn from all these individuals about the development of their collections during in-person events, classroom visits, and archival research sessions. Their discussion and careful thinking through of the challenges that accompany trying to collect and preserve comics and zines in both institutional and independent spaces has been hugely influential in my thinking. Freedman, Miller, Wilde, and Wooten have been active in considering the difficulties of cataloging and preserving zines in libraries and archives, creating zines, and curating digital spaces and projects like https://www.zinelibraries.info/ and https://zinecat.org/. Beyond Eichhorn’s book, which treats Darms, Freedman, and Wooten, Nick Sousanis’s “Life in Comics” profiles Green’s career in comics, and Alana Kumbier has a chapter about the Queer Zine Archive Project in their book Ephemeral Material. Darms also has a book, The Riot Grrrl Collection, that showcases some of the zines in the Riot Grrrl Collection she initiated as part of the Downtown Collection at NYU Fales, and Wooten has coedited a collection with Liz Bly, Make Your Own History.
Caswell, Punzalan, and Sangwand, “Critical Archival Studies,” 2. In addition to this essay, another piece by Caswell, “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives,” provides an overview of some of the trends that animate the research of archivists and information studies scholars who engage the archives in a critical fashion.
DiVeglia, “Accessibility, Accountability, and Activism,” 72.
Keating, “Archival Alchemy and Allure”; Bost, “Messy Archives and Materials That Matter.”
I further discuss the rise of LGBTQ archives during the 1970s and 1980s in chapter 1.
I further discuss how institutional and university archives started to collect HIV/AIDS materials in chapter 5, but Marika Cifor’s recent Viral Cultures is a must-read deep dive on this topic.
Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” 648.
DeCrescenzo, “Alison Bechdel Celebrates 20 Years,” 25.
Als, “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress.”
1. The Collage Activists
Vance, “Epilogue,” 431.
Alderfer et al., Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, 2, 38, 44–67. The scholars and activists who participated as part of the conference planning committee were Julie Abraham, Hannah Alderfer, Meryl Altman, Jan Boney, Frances Doughty, Ellen DuBois, Kate Ellis, Judith Friedlander, Julie German, Faye Ginsburg, Diane Harriford, Beth Jaker, Mary Clare Lennon, Sherry Manasse, Nancy K. Miller, Marybeth Nelson, Esther Newton, Claire Riley, Susan R. Sacks, Ann Snitow, Quandra P. Stadler, Judy R. Walkowitz, Ellen Willis, and Patsy Yaeger.
Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism, “We Protest.”
Vance, “Epilogue,” 432. For a comprehensive overview of the conference planning and aftermath, see Corbman, “Scholars and the Feminists.”
Vance, “Epilogue,” 433; Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism, “We Protest.” As Carole S. Vance alludes to in her epilogue to Pleasure and Danger and Rachel Corbman and Lorna Norman Bracewell confirm in their retrospective research on the conference, the leaflet was largely composed by the Women Against Pornography and the other two groups were mere signatories. See Corbman, “Scholars and the Feminists,” 60; and Bracewell, “Beyond Barnard,” 24.
Vance, “Epilogue,” 434.
Vance, “More Danger, More Pleasure,” 295. As Vance recounts in her epilogue to Pleasure and Danger: “‘Friends’ and colleagues decided they were too controversial to associate with; anonymous calls were made to their employers; they were disinvited to feminist panels and conferences; projects in which they were even marginally involved were blacklisted. Personal attacks made at the conference disrupted their lives for months” (434).
As Vance recounts in her epilogue to Pleasure and Danger, “The Diary was eventually reprinted and distributed, but not without the intervention of a lawyer, and plans for a 1983 conference handbook were scuttled” (434).
Women’s Center, “Women’s Center Annual Report.”
Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader; de Lauretis, “Queer Theory.”
The print run of the original, uncensored Diary, which the Barnard administration confiscated, was 1,500. Vance, “Epilogue,” 431.
Vance, “Epilogue”; Echols, “Retrospective”; Rubin, “Blood under the Bridge”; Corbman, “Scholars and the Feminists”; Bracewell, “Beyond Barnard”; Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars; Bronstein, Battling Pornography.
Ault, Show and Tell, 7–8.
Ault, 37, 49.
Ault, 48.
Heresies Collective, “Heresies #12.”
Heresies Collective, 36–37.
These details about the creation of the cover for Pleasure and Danger come from an email in which Alderfer and Nelson shared, “The cover of Pleasure and Danger was actually collaged in black and white, then color Xeroxed. Those are photos of Hannah’s legs, Beth’s stairwell, the handbag was cut from an ad, and the ledger drawn in.” Nelson and Alderfer, “Re: Caught Looking Etc.”
Nan D. Hunter creates a timeline that chronicles the growing debate, tracing the movement from an anti-pornography ordinance that was first drafted in 1983 by Dworkin and MacKinnon for use in Minneapolis, then adapted in 1984 for Indianapolis following Minneapolis’s rejection of the measure. FACT and other groups then fought the ordinance in court, which the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled unconstitutional in 1985. The Supreme Court finally confirmed it as unconstitutional when it refused to hear the case in February 1986. Hunter, “Pornography Debate in Context.”
Hunter and Law, “Brief Amici Curiae,” 70.
Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson, “Designers’ Statement,” 5.
Ellis, O’Dair, and Tallmer, “Introduction,” 8.
Nestle, “Will to Remember,” 86–87; Nestle, “Who Were We?,” 240.
Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson, “Designers’ Statement,” 5. Later in their statement in Caught Looking, they note, “Most of the images were donated by private collectors, photographers, models and artists, rather than drawn from generally available commercial photography.”
The artists’ approach to the research for these images, like the method of combining images on the page, is one of collage. This process is distinct from historical research in that these materials are transferred from their original contexts and connected with images from other contexts in order to create a broader argument about sexuality.
The conclusion to this chapter outlines some of the renewed attention the feminist sex wars have received in recent years.
As Marika Cifor puts it, “The community archives movement exploded in the wake of upheaval prompted by 1960s’ to 1970s’ social movements. In the 1980s, a gay and lesbian archives movement began to flourish, offering a means to locate and remember queer lived experiences and to evade and contest social subordination” (Viral Cultures, 19).
Marika Cifor and Stacy Wood review the connections between social movements and archives building more broadly in the postwar era (“Critical Feminism in the Archives,” 3–7).
DiVeglia, “Accessibility, Accountability, and Activism,” 73.
Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings, 252.
Ellis et al., Caught Looking (1986 ed.), 96.
In thinking through how records never remain static in the archives, Ketelaar writes, “Every interaction, intervention, interrogation, and interpretation by creator, user, and archivist is an activation of the record. The archive is an infinite activation of the record. Each activation leaves fingerprints which are attributes to the archive’s infinite meanings” (“Tacit Narratives,” 137).
Eichhorn, Archival Turn in Feminism, 3.
The Diary was produced for the roughly 750 conference participants, while Caught Looking was produced in four editions in 1986, 1988, 1992, and 1995, with the first and second editions each printed in runs of five thousand copies. Many of the visual materials across this book, though rare, exist in multiple copies and are organized in different collections at various archives, as the following chapter will explore. Because they are not physically fragile, many of the archives allow relatively unfettered use, adopting the “preservation through use” attitude of the Interference Archive, a grassroots institution that makes social movement documents available to the general public. Sellie et al., “Interference Archive.”
Alderfer et al., Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, 70.
Alderfer et al., 43, 48–49, 54–55, 60–61, 69.
The start of the next chapter discusses the beginnings of the feminist sex wars before the Barnard Sex Conference.
In a chronological account of key events of “the pornography debate,” Nan D. Hunter traces how the anti-pornography ordinance was introduced in a variety of U.S. locations between 1983 and 1985: Minneapolis; Indianapolis; Suffolk County, New York; Los Angeles; Cambridge, Massachusetts. In most of these places it was soundly defeated, though it initially gained some traction in Indianapolis until the U.S. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional. Hunter, “Pornography Debate in Context,” 29.
Vance, “Epilogue,” 431.
Snitow, Feminism of Uncertainty, 77–78.
Ellis et al., Caught Looking (1986 ed.), 94–96.
Barry, One Hundred Demons; Barry, What It Is; Barry, Picture This; Barry, Blabber Blabber Blabber; Barry, Syllabus; Lopez, Lap Dancing for Mommy; Lopez, Flaming Iguanas; Lopez, Girl Must Die. Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson even incorporated some of Barry’s work from NAKED LADIES! NAKED LADIES! NAKED LADIES! into Caught Looking.
Alderfer et al., Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, 9.
By contrast, many of the academics in the conference planning group here and in subsequent pages opt for printed text that would allow them the space for a mini treatise on sexuality. Both Jaker and Nelson also choose to handwrite in plain block letters to convey their remarks and focus their words on the form of the diary in their entries printed later in the volume. The fact that all three artists wrote about the form of a diary in their own handwriting and how it can reveal truths makes sense since they were primarily responsible for the Diary’s visual conceptualization. Alderfer et al., 9, 25, 41, 71–72.
The conference planning committee continued to meet through April, but these initial meetings were especially important to share as they established the framework and guiding principles for the event. Alderfer et al., 72.
Piepmeier, Girl Zines, 79.
Butler, “Politics, Pleasure, Pain,” par. 1.
Corbman, “Scholars and the Feminists,” 59.
Barnard’s archives reveal the starkness of this difference, as the Diary stands out among the minimal, four-page pamphlets of conferences from the years prior and following. There was also a similar four-page pamphlet produced for the 1982 conference to accompany the Diary.
Alderfer et al., Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, 1.
Alderfer et al., 2.
Alderfer et al., 4–34.
Alderfer et al., 6–8, 10–11; Butler, “Politics, Pleasure, Pain.”
Alderfer et al., Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, 26–29.
In addition to the photos in the comic itself, the inclusion of text in a thin space below each panel transforms each one into a Polaroid.
Alderfer et al., 3.
Alderfer et al., 73.
Alderfer et al., 40.
Bronstein, Battling Pornography, 215.
Hunter, “Pornography Debate in Context,” 27–28. In Paula Webster’s account of a Women Against Pornography slideshow, she recounts the array of explicitly and implicitly pornographic images that the group included in its presentation: “I remember seeing a slide show with about 30 images of predominantly heterosexual couples engaged in intercourse (genital and anal), bondage, and sadomasochism. There were shots of individual women, bound and gagged, pictures of female dominatrices, assorted album covers, posters, clothing advertisements, as well as a handful of very jarring images of self-mutilation and the now-infamous Hustler photos of women arranged as food on a platter or put through a meat grinder” (“Pornography and Pleasure,” 31).
Bronstein, Battling Pornography, 217.
Hunter, “Pornography Debate in Context,” 28.
Elinor Fuchs, “Staging the Obscene Body,” 35, 55.
Beth Jaker and Nan D. Hunter were also involved in editing Caught Looking.
Ellis, O’Dair, and Tallmer, “Introduction,” 4.
Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson, “Designers’ Statement,” 5.
Ellis et al., Caught Looking, 1986, 60–61.
Ellis et al., 3.
Duggan, “Censorship in the Name of Feminism,” 65.
Heresies Collective, “Heresies #12,” 48–51. Webster also participated as a member of the Heresies Collective who edited the “Sex Issue.”
Webster, “Pornography and Pleasure,” 34.
Webster, 32–33.
This pairing is remembered today in how the word cougar is used to describe an alluring older woman who preys on younger men.
Duggan and Hunter, Sex Wars, 26; “American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. Hudnut.”
Ellis, O’Dair, and Tallmer, “Introduction,” 8.
Ellis, O’Dair, and Tallmer, 8.
There was a print run of five thousand copies for the first and second editions of the book, while the print run for the other editions remains unknown.
Ellis et al., Caught Looking (1988 ed.).
Ellis et al., Caught Looking (1992 ed.).
Stein, “Introduction to Barnard Special Issue”; Love, “Introduction”; Walters, “Introduction.”
“About the Journal.” As editor Heather K. Love acknowledges in the text prefacing the Diary’s reprinting, “Despite subsequent reprinting, the Diary remains exceedingly rare” (“Diary of a Conference on Sexuality,” 50).
Abelove, Barale, and Halperin, Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.
Love, “Diary of a Conference on Sexuality,” 54–61.
Love, 50.
The print run of the original, uncensored Diary, which the Barnard administration confiscated, was 1,500. Vance, “Epilogue,” 431.
2. The Comics Visionaries
Hunter, “Contextualizing the Sexuality Debates.”
Hunter, 22–23; Rich, “Feminism and Sexuality in the 1980s,” 526.
Visual artist Tee Corinne, in the opening lines of an article where she recovers these works for the feminist audience of the Country Women periodical, recounts the reasons that feminists reject comics: “One of the reasons I wanted to write about women’s comics is that most women’s bookstores do not carry them because: ‘They are too dirty,’ ‘They are too violent,’ ‘They do not further the revolution,’ ‘They don’t uplift women’s ideals,’ etc. Or, as one East Coast Women’s Bookstore owner put it: ‘Women have better things to spend their money on than that trash’” (“Comics by Women,” 25). I discuss this article and Corinne’s research binder of women’s comics that she archived at the Lesbian Herstory Archives throughout a piece tracing lesbian comics networks through archives (“Archiving Grassroots Comics”).
Kirtley, “‘Word to You Feminist Women’”; Cook, “Underground and Alternative Comics.”
In this chapter, I am broadly using the general spelling of comics rather than adopting comix, in order to emphasize and foreground the connections of these feminist works with other comics by women, past and present. Comics within the underground were often called comix, for as Roger Sabin explains, “Instead of pandering to a kids’ market, these [underground] titles spoke to the counter-culture on its own terms, which meant dealing with subjects like drugs, anti-Vietnam protest, rock music and, above all, sex” (Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, 92). Further, as Nicholas Sammond relates in an entry on “comix” for Keywords in Comics Studies, “Robert Crumb is usually given credit for swapping the second c in comics to the x in comix. . . . First and foremost, the new spelling was a rejection of the North American comics industry and its restrictive and prudish Comics Code. . . . A potent signifier, the x invoked a rejection of the code in favor of unbridled, libidinous, and uncensored expression. It foreshadowed the X rating for movies” (58).
Marrs, Wimmen’s Comix #2. Marrs contributed front covers to Rudahl, Wimmen’s Comix #3, and Leschen and Dinegar, Wimmen’s Comix #9, and the back cover for Robbins and Richards, Wimmen’s Comix #5.
While many scholars describe Gregory as the first openly lesbian contributor to Wimmen’s Comix, it is important to note that she identifies as bisexual. In her scholarship on Wimmen’s Comix, Leah Misemer discusses the import of Gregory’s comics to the series and how she was in dialogue with other creators on the matter of sexuality. Gregory, “Modern Romance”; Gomez, “She Changed Comics”; Misemer, “Serial Critique.”
Robbins, “Wimmen’s Studies,” 31.
Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #1; Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #2; Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #3; Gregory, Dynamite Damsels.
Chute, “Introduction”; Kirtley, “‘Word to You Feminist Women’”; Meier, “On Teenage Abortions”; Meier, “Forgotten History”; Misemer, “Hands across the Ocean”; Misemer, “Serial Critique”; Sammond, “Meeting in the Archive.”
Sherman, “Interview with Trina Robbins,” 54.
“Interviews with Women Comic Artists: Lee Marrs,” 24.
Nicholas Sammond has written about the distribution troubles of women’s and queer underground comics, honing his insights through interviews with underground cartoonists and publishers. He notes how the underground publishers who welcomed women and gay perspectives were founded on publishing straight men, so the established distribution networks were not entirely welcoming to these titles. He also observes that women’s bookstores were hospitable to some titles, “but those outlets were limited and the network unreliable” (“Meeting in the Archive,” 106). Rachel R. Miller has discussed how feminist titles also encountered difficulty getting shelved, noting that “comic-book shops often marginalized comics by women by bagging and shelving them alongside pornographic or erotic comic books because of their explicit depictions of sex, queerness, and women’s bodies” (“When Feminism Went to Market,” 430).
“Interviews with Women Comic Artists: Lee Marrs,” 24.
These remarks come not only at a time of transition in the movement at large, but also for the women creating feminist comics in the underground movement. Both Wimmen’s Comix and Tits & Clits stopped publishing for seven years near the end of the 1970s, amplifying these sentiments. Their feelings of dismissal were also heightened by fractures within the Wimmen’s Comix collective. Both scholars and the cartoonists themselves often individualize this rift, focusing on a select group of specific women—Trina Robbins on one side and Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin on the other—who disagreed about what constituted feminist art. Kominsky-Crumb and Noomin ultimately separated from the collective in the late 1970s and published their own comic book, Twisted Sisters (1976), which featured solely their own comics. However, the movement was bigger than just these women: none of them was particularly central to Tits & Clits and nearly each issue of both series contained a different constellation of contributors with their own particular viewpoints, who numbered over a hundred for both series over the course of their run. While the seven-year publishing drought contributed to the ill feelings captured in these interviews, its cessation motivated artists to branch out and pursue other publishing opportunities and also welcomed in new energy and new artists when the comics continued, reinvigorating both series in ways that are not often discussed. Moreover, when Wimmen’s Comix returned in the 1980s, Robbins, Kominsky-Crumb, and Noomin all contributed to the series, often within the same issue. Still, this moment of pause in the late 1970s when the artists weigh in about their collective project and its struggles embodies the critique of the movement at large and their local version of the movement that Marrs and Gregory unwind in comics form in order to theorize new future possibilities. See Gebbie and Bucher, Wimmen’s Comix #7; LeMieux and Binswanger, Wimmen’s Comix #8; Farmer and Fleener, Tits & Clits #7; Kominsky and Noomin, Twisted Sisters; Chute, “Introduction”; Dueben, “Oral History of Wimmen’s Comix”; Robbins, “Babes & Women”; Noomin, “Wimmin and Comix”; “Interviews with Women Comic Artists: Aline Kominsky”; Kirtley, “‘Word to You Feminist Women’”; Galvan, “Archiving Wimmen.”
Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #1; Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #2; Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #3; Gregory, Dynamite Damsels.
Sammond, “Meeting in the Archive,” 107; Gomez, “She Changed Comics.”
Hesford, Feeling Women’s Liberation, 4.
“Interviews with Women Comic Artists: Lee Marrs”; Marrs, “Interview with Lee Marrs”; House, Cowan, and Gregory, “Criticism, Feedback and Changes”; Aldama, “Roberta Gregory.”
Beins, Liberation in Print, 15.
Beins, 91–114.
Stoler, Along the Archival Grain.
Kirtley, “‘Word to You Feminist Women,’” 275.
Chute, “Introduction,” 20–24. For more on the importance of Chute’s creation of a genealogy of modern women cartoonists amid a discussion of other similar contemporary projects, see Galvan, “From Julie Doucet to Gabrielle Bell.”
Underground cartoonist Trina Robbins has been doing recovery work of women cartoonists since the mid-1980s and has published numerous volumes attempting a full history of women producing in the comics form alongside a number of volumes focused on recovering the work and history of specific women producing comics during different eras of the twentieth century. See Robbins and yronwode, Women and the Comics; Robbins, Century of Women Cartoonists; Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz; Robbins, Nell Brinkley and the New Woman; Robbins, Great Women Cartoonists; Robbins, “Wimmen’s Studies”; Robbins, Brinkley Girls; Robbins, Pretty in Ink; Robbins, “Babes & Women”; Robbins, Babes in Arms; Robbins, Flapper Queens.
Sammond, “Meeting in the Archive,” 110. Jean Bessette further meditates on how archives are shaped by various implicit and explicit ideologies across her monograph Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: “The evidence housed and highlighted in archives can be shaped by the archive itself. The organization, mediation, and even production of archival records and artifacts occur in specific rhetorical situations in response to historically located exigencies. The implications of this point should prompt rhetoricians and historians alike to attend critically to the circumstances of the production and preservation of historical evidence. When and through what means was the record produced, mediated, selected and arranged?” (135–36).
“Steve Willis Underground Comics Collection”; “Lynn R. Hansen Underground Comics Collection.”
Rosenkranz, Rebel Visions. I discuss how the typical periodization marginalizes comics by women and LGBTQ folks in Galvan, “Adjacent Genealogies, Alternate Geographies.”
Galvan, “Archiving Grassroots Comics”; Galvan, “Finding Feminist Comics Histories.”
Eichhorn, Archival Turn in Feminism; Beins and Enszer, “‘We Couldn’t Get Them Printed’”; Meagher, “‘Difficult, Messy, Nasty, and Sensational’”; Enszer, “‘Fighting to Create and Maintain”; Enszer, “Night Heron Press”; McKinney, “Newsletter Networks”; Groeneveld, Making Feminist Media; Hogan, Feminist Bookstore Movement; Beins, Liberation in Print; Bessette, Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives; Meagher and Runyon, “Backward Glances.” There have also been numerous special issues of academic journals focused on the recovery of contemporary feminist history, including Adkins and Dever, “Archives and New Modes of Feminist Research”; Groeneveld and Thrift, “Thinking beyond Backlash”; and Jordan and Meagher, “Feminist Periodical Studies.”
Agatha Beins’s canny reading of the periodical page at the outset of Liberation in Print is relevant for discussing comics as I discuss in the introduction to this book, though she does not address comics within her monograph.
Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #1, 3, 5–6.
Marrs, 6.
Marrs, 10.
Warren, “Consciousness-Raising and Difference,” 3; Allan et al., Self-Health.
Kaplan, Erotics of Talk, 155.
Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #1, 10–11.
Murphy, “Immodest Witnessing”; Caruana, “Great Yogurt Conspiracy.”
Caruana, “Great Yogurt Conspiracy.”
Murphy, “Immodest Witnessing,” 136.
Caruana, “Great Yogurt Conspiracy.”
Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #1, 11.
Marrs, 25.
Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #2, 42.
Some of the most outwardly psychedelic women’s comics can be seen in the work of Willy Mendes, who edited a psychedelic collection of comics titled Illuminations and published “Wiley Willy’s Realm of Karma Comix” and other pieces that integrate high concentrations of patterning and geometric repetition in All Girl Thrills. While Marrs’s comics are more subtle and conventionally cartoony in their design, she also had connections to psychedelia, as evidenced by her editing of Spit in the Ocean #4, a literary series initiated by Ken Kesey, whose writing appeared in every issue.
Cixous, “Laugh of the Medusa,” 887–88.
Cixous.
Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #2, 4.
Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #3, 5–6.
Marrs, 6.
Marrs, 16–19, 40–42.
Marrs, 48.
This opening up of narrative possibilities echoes the theoretical writings of Joanna Russ, a science fiction author and feminist whose 1972 essay “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write” discussed how women characters were often constrained by patriarchal narrative structures and theorized how science fiction could offer more narrative possibilities for women that broke with these limitations.
This group, who soon named themselves the Radicalesbians, also distributed the now-iconic “Woman-Identified Woman” statement at this action. Gallo, Different Daughters, 173–74; Mankiller et al., Reader’s Companion to U.S. Women’s History, 330–31; Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, 92.
Davies, “Lavender Menace Members Hold Signs.”
“Lavender Menace Action.”
There are a couple of independent prefatory comics at the outset and one at the conclusion that, in addition to the usual paratexts, frame the main narrative and contribute to the thirty-six-page comic.
Gregory, Dynamite Damsels, 4.
Although the story line follows Frieda and her sexual evolution, race does return in a later vignette, “Nothing Remains Constant,” that also features the character of Edie. Here, a Black male challenges her commitment to her race by denigrating her involvement with “that white women’s lib.” While this confrontation forces her to consider if she “[has] to decide whether [she’s] more black or more woman?” and quit that particular consciousness-raising group, she affirms her commitment to feminism by participating in a “black sisters C.R. group” that’s “plan[ning] the constitution for [a] new black women’s liberation group.” Her movement out of the overwhelmingly white group and into her own space echoes contemporaneous moves by Black feminists like Barbara Smith, who helped start the Black lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective in 1974 and coedited with Lorraine Bethel Conditions Five: The Black Women’s Issue. There is a moment of possible reconciliation later when Frieda says that Edie’s planning a shared potluck for the two groups, but we never see this potluck made manifest. Gregory, 21, 23; Combahee River Collective, “Combahee River Collective Statement.”
Gregory, Dynamite Damsels, 4.
Gregory, 4.
Gregory, 7.
Gregory, 9, 17.
Gregory, 9.
Gregory, 17.
Gregory, 17.
Gregory, 9.
Gregory, 14–16.
Her exuberant outcry “Sisterhood is beautiful” echoes Sisterhood Is Powerful, and this repetition is confirmed by her T-shirt, which has the woman’s symbol with a fist on it, also recalling the feminist warrior of Dynamite Damsel’s cover. Gregory, 14.
Gregory, Dynamite Damsels, 14.
Gregory, 15.
Gregory, 15.
Gregory, 16.
Gregory, 24.
Gregory, 28.
Gregory, 28–29.
Gregory, 29.
Galvan, “Archiving Grassroots Comics.”
To read about the complexity of romance comics genre, see Nolan, Love on the Racks; Heifler, “Teen Age Temptations”; and “PanelxPanel #36—Romance.”
Mangels, Gay Comics #21.
Cruse, Gay Comix #2.
Mangels, Gay Comix #14.
Mangels, Gay Comics #25.
Camper, Rude Girls and Dangerous Women.
Camper, Juicy Mother; Camper, Juicy Mother 2. I further trace the contours of Camper’s career and her community-building ethos in an article about her work which appeared in an issue of Journal of Lesbian Studies dedicated to lesbian comics; see Galvan, “Making Space.”
Mangels, “History of Contributors,” 75; Warren, Dyke Strippers, 67; Ewing, “Longtime Pacific Center Executive Director.”
Mangels, “History of Contributors,” 76; Beirne, “Image, Sex, and Politics,” 54.
Warren, Dyke Strippers, 157.
Natalie, Stonewall Riots; Natalie, Night Audrey’s Vibrator Spoke; Natalie, Rubyfruit Mountain.
Warren, Dyke Strippers.
Warren, 7.
Cruse, Gay Comix #1, n.p.
Eichhorn, Archival Turn in Feminism.
Sammond, “Meeting in the Archive,” 110.
Galvan, “Archiving Grassroots Comics.”
Some duplicates of certain comics also exist within the zines collection upstairs at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, suggesting the possibility for how these comics play a role within multiple histories.
3. The Newspaper Cartoonist
Bechdel, Fun Home; Lacayo and Grossman, “10 Best Books”; “John Simon Guggenheim Foundation”; “MacArthur Fellows Program”; Playbill Staff, “Fun Home Breaks Box Office Record.” Hillary Chute also sums up the many accolades that Bechdel has received since Fun Home’s publication in her preface to interviews with Bechdel that she published in Outside the Box and in her account of Bechdel’s influence in her chapter about queer comics in Why Comics? See Chute, “Alison Bechdel”; and Chute, “Why Queer?”
Bechdel, Indelible Alison Bechdel, 9; Rubenstein and Bechdel, “Alison Bechdel Interview,” 115–16.
Bechdel, Indelible Alison Bechdel, 27; Bechdel, “Dykes to Watch Out For, Plate No. 19.”
Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For; Bechdel, Indelible Alison Bechdel, 28.
Bechdel, Dykes to Watch Out For; Bechdel, More “Dykes to Watch Out For.”
Bechdel, Essential “Dykes to Watch Out For.” For some scholars, like Judith Kegan Gardiner, this collection becomes the space through which to analyze the overarching series; see “Queering Genre.” Bechdel’s publication of her first collection with Firebrand Books in 1986 combined with her success at self-syndicating the strip and developing a stable readership that she could count on may have contributed to her choice to redevelop the strip with recurring characters, which launched in February 1987. Bechdel, “Dykes to Watch Out For: One Enchanted Evening.”
Bechdel, “Cartoonist’s Introduction,” xiv.
In a 1995 interview with Anne Rubenstein, Bechdel explains how she got started at WomaNews: “And I started volunteering at a feminist newspaper called WomaNews where I did paste-up and production and wrote an occasional review” (“Alison Bechdel Interview,” 116). In a 1990 interview with Chris Dodge, Bechdel describes her work at Equal Time: “Equal Time comes out every two weeks and it’s a community newspaper for lesbians and gay men. And my job is doing all the key lining and layout production and doing the physical part of the paper” (“Interview with Alison Bechdel,” 5).
I analyze how Bechdel uses this strip to participate in and theorize queer subjectivity and difference at the time in a chapter within a collection of essays on Bechdel; see Galvan, “Servants to What Cause.”
In designating certain archives as queer-adjacent, I identify spaces that aren’t explicitly queer but that contain a lot of materials relevant to queer experience, like the Sophia Smith Collection. This use of adjacent resonates with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussion of the non-dualistic nature of beside in Touching Feeling and how the spaciousness of that preposition allows “a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations” (8).
These special issues and edited collection have been central locations mapping out the emerging scholarly conversation around queer comics: Scott and Fawaz, “Queer about Comics”; Abate, Grice, and Stamper, “Lesbian Content and Queer Female Characters in Comics”; Halsall and Warren, LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader.
Gay Comix was a comics series that ran for twenty-five issues between 1980 and 1998 under three successive editors: Howard Cruse (#1–4), Robert Triptow (#5–13), and Andy Mangels (#14–25). In issue #15 (1992), Mangels renamed the series Gay Comics, acknowledging the changing times and diminished presence of the underground comix scene that initially birthed the series. When discussing the series collectively, I refer to it by its initial title as that appears to be the general convention.
Cruse, Triptow, and Mangels, Gay Comix #1–25; Melia and Gracey-Whitman, Strip AIDS; Robbins, Sienkiewicz, and Triptow, Strip AIDS USA; Triptow, Gay Comics; Warren, Dyke Strippers; Camper, Juicy Mother; Camper, Juicy Mother 2; Murphy, Gay Genius; Hall, No Straight Lines; Christensen, Anything That Loves; Kirby, QU33R; Macy and Avery, alphabet; Jesanis, Lorenz, and Glass, Being True; Thornton and Avery, We’re Still Here; Joy, Gauvin, and Lee, Rainbow Reflections; Bors, Be Gay, Do Comics!; Greenwood, Assan, and Eaton, When I Was Me.
Mangels, “Alison Bechdel.” This is the same series that inspired Bechdel to start cartooning in the early 1980s after she encountered it in the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, a gay bookstore in Greenwich Village in New York City. Bechdel, Indelible Alison Bechdel, 9.
Hall, “No Straight Lines,” n.p.
Rubenstein and Bechdel, “Alison Bechdel Interview,” 114.
Robbins and Bechdel, “Watch Out for Alison Bechdel,” 82.
Bechdel, Fun Home; Bechdel, “United States.”
Hilty, “Joan Hilty Letter to Alison Bechdel.”
Bechdel, “Questions for Syndicate.”
In both the Rubenstein and Robbins interviews Bechdel referenced turning down UPS’s offer due, in part, to not wanting to have to alter her politics for a mainstream audience. She discussed her decision at length in the Rubenstein interview, saying, “The woman I talked to said they were thinking of a strip that had both men and women in it, and that was ‘less political’ than Dykes to Watch Out For. . . . But eventually I came to my senses and told them I didn’t want to pursue it. I’m really happy doing what I’m doing. And I have less than no interest in speaking to the mainstream.” Rubenstein and Bechdel, “Alison Bechdel Interview,” 121; Robbins and Bechdel, “Watch Out for Alison Bechdel,” 85.
She eventually stopped the side business in the mid-1990s because it was very labor-intensive but not very profitable. As she described in the 2001 Robbins interview, “It was exhausting and I realized that I was barely breaking even. It did help me to support myself for years but it just got to be too much work. It might have been OK if I was just creating the designs and someone else was running the business. I was doing almost everything myself. Writing clever copy for the catalog, doing the layout, dealing with T-shirt wholesalers, taking orders from people over the phone—I’d pretend I wasn’t me when I answered so people wouldn’t know it was this pathetic one-person operation. It was all fun for a while, but eventually it became clear that this was a sad misallocation of my skills.” Robbins and Bechdel, “Watch Out for Alison Bechdel,” 83–84.
Bechdel, “Dykes to Watch Out For: Groves of Academe.”
Sheklow, “Letter to Alison Bechdel.”
While researching in Bechdel’s papers, I encountered numerous letters of this sort among her correspondence with specific periodicals. In a chapter dedicated to her readership in The Indelible Alison Bechdel, Bechdel shows how thoroughly readers engage with her strip by reprinting numerous excerpts from letters she’s received over the years, prefacing them by saying, “Serial episodes appear in newspapers every two weeks, and thus I have the dubious privilege of receiving constant feedback about the progress of the narrative. Being an assertive, egalitarian lot, my audience does not scruple to let me know what’s wrong (or right, for that matter) with the strip, or to inform me of directions and issues that they think I should be exploring” (207–8). For more on the community of readers who wrote letters to Bechdel, see Kirsten Leng’s article in Feminist Media Studies.
In her 1995 Rubenstein interview, Bechdel discusses how she drew on these periodicals when creating her strip: “Should I tell you how I create a strip? First, I procrastinate until the last possible minute. Then I go to the huge stack of magazines and newspapers I get every month and skim through them, making notes about what’s going on in the world, and in the community, what the latest issue is, what people are wearing. . . . I just feed all this stuff into the hopper. Then I get out my big chart. I have all my episodes listed on one axis, and all my characters on the other so I can track what’s happening to whom and whose story needs attention. . . . I get a foot-high stack of queer papers every month. And ’zines. And I get The Nation, and Ms., and miscellaneous newsletters and magazines. On Our Backs—rather, off our backs. Well, actually I read them both. And the daily paper, of course. It all goes into the hopper.” Rubenstein and Bechdel, “Alison Bechdel Interview,” 119–20.
Bechdel, Indelible Alison Bechdel, 71–83.
De Lauretis, “Imaging,” 67–68.
Stephenson, “Alison Bechdel.”
Bechdel, “Cartoonist’s Introduction,” xiv. With this pledge, Bechdel is also referencing an Adrienne Rich passage that she shows herself and an early lesbian lover reading a few pages earlier: “Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language—this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.” Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1995 ed.), 199; Bechdel, “Cartoonist’s Introduction,” x.
Bechdel, “Dykes to Watch Out For 1994 Calendar.”
Stephenson, “Alison Bechdel,” 6.
Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings; Cvetkovich, “Drawing the Archive”; Chute, “Animating an Archive”; Eichhorn, Archival Turn in Feminism; Kumbier, Ephemeral Material.
Chute, “Animating an Archive.”
Bechdel, “Memoirist’s Lament.”
Bechdel, “From the Archives”; Bechdel, “Ithaca.”
Bechdel, “Cartoonist’s Introduction,” vii.
Bechdel, viii.
Bechdel, “From the Archives.”
Cvetkovich, Archive of Feelings, 268.
De Lauretis, “Imaging,” 67–68.
DiVeglia, “Accessibility, Accountability, and Activism,” 88.
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11.
Galvan, “Archiving Grassroots Comics,” par. 9.
As I examine through this chapter, the relationship between all these elements of an individual page matters, building off of how Agatha Beins conceptualizes the space of the periodical page, as I discuss in the introduction to this book. See Beins, Liberation in Print.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2007 ed.).
Beins and Enszer, “‘We Couldn’t Get Them Printed’”; Beins, Liberation in Print; Beins, “Publishing Assemblage”; Enszer, “Night Heron Press”; Enszer, “‘Fighting to Create and Maintain’”; Enszer, “Lesbian Books”; McKinney, “Newsletter Networks”; Groeneveld, “Letters to the Editor”; Blackwell, “Engendering Print Cultures”; Korinek, “VOICES of Gay, Lesbian, and Feminist Activists”; Meagher, “‘Difficult, Messy, Nasty, and Sensational’”; Springer, “Soul of Women’s Lib.” A number of the most recent articles here come from “Feminist Periodical Studies,” a special issue of American Periodicals edited by Tessa Jordan and Michelle Meagher.
Bechdel, “Advertisement: WomaNews Workshops.”
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11.
Two months after first publishing in WomaNews, Bechdel joined the staff box (masthead) as a named contributor; two months later, in the December 1983/January 1984 issue, she appeared as a full member of the collective’s staff, a position she continued to hold for a year and a half until the July/August 1985 issue.
Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Pen-Biting Agitated Female”; Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Contortionist Letter-Writer”; Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Intent, Typewriting Female”; Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Chainsmoking Letter-Writer”; Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Pensive Letter-Writer”; Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: M&M Letter-Writer.”
Bechdel, “Literary Dykes to Watch Out For” (1984 ed.); Bechdel, “Literary Dykes to Watch Out For” (1986 ed.).
Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Pen-Biting Agitated Female.”
Coincidentally, the October 1983 issue was the first in which Bechdel was listed in the staff box as a contributor to the collective.
Anzaldúa and Moraga, “Bring Bridge Back!”; WomaNews Collective, “Persephone Press Passes.”
Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: M&M Letter-Writer.”
Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Intent, Typewriting Female”; Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Chainsmoking Letter-Writer.”
Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Contortionist Letter-Writer.”
Bechdel, “Letters Page Caricature Graphic: Pensive Letter-Writer.”
Bechdel, “Literary Dykes to Watch Out For” (1984 ed.).
Heloise C. Bland, an anagram of Bechdel’s first and last name, is one of a few anagram avatars she deploys in DTWOF.
Linda M. Scott describes the huge public response following the advertisement in January 1984, which translated into big sales for Apple in the following months. See “‘For the Rest of Us,’” 67–68.
In an interview with Circles, a lesbian publication based in Colorado, Bechdel discusses how she had encountered many young women in recent years who first learned about lesbian culture through her Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip: “And one of these young women said—and this is some feedback that I’ve heard quite frequently—that her first exposure to the lesbian community was through my cartoon. That before she was out she had access to the cartoons and this was what she thought it was going to be like! [laughing] And in some ways it was and some ways it wasn’t like that when she finally got out into the world. But I think it’s really bizarre that the strip is some people’s first glimpse of [lesbian life]. That puts a lot of pressure on me” (McChesney, “Hot Throbs,” 42).
Bechdel, “Advertisement: WomaNews 5th Anniversary! Variety Show!,” November 1984; Bechdel, “Advertisement: WomaNews 5th Anniversary! Variety Show!,” December 1984 / January 1985.
Lambert, “Rockettes and Race,” par. 11.
Lambert, par. 18.
Peterson, “Rockettes.”
Alderfer et al., Diary of a Conference on Sexuality; Marrs, Pudge, Girl Blimp #1.
Bechdel, “Advertisement: Get Yourself a WomaNews T-Shirt!”
Bechdel, “Same as It Ever Was.”
Bechdel, “Postcards from the Edge.”
Bechdel, “Mo’ Mo.”
Bechdel, “What Is Real?”
Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 11.
Stephenson, “Alison Bechdel.”
Adair and Nakamura, “Digital Afterlives”; Eckardt, “Photographer Nan Goldin”; Miller, “Why Nan Goldin.”
4. The Editor and Pedagogue
Moraga, “Catching Fire,” xxi.
Adair and Nakamura, “Digital Afterlives,” 255.
Moraga and Anzaldúa, “Introduction, 1981,” xlv. In this section of the introduction, Anzaldúa and Moraga reflect at length on the importance of this textual range: “The selections in this anthology range from extemporaneous stream of consciousness journal entries to well thought-out theoretical statements; from intimate letters to friends to full-scale public addresses. In addition, the book includes poems and transcripts, personal conversations and interviews. The works combined reflect a diversity of perspectives, linguistic styles, and cultural tongues. In editing the anthology, our primary commitment was to retaining this diversity, as well as each writer’s especial voice and style. The book is intended to reflect our color loud and clear, not tone it down. As editors we sought out, and believe we found, non-rhetorical, highly personal chronicles that present a political analysis in everyday terms” (xliv–xlv).
Keating, “Introduction,” 9.
Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues,” 163.
“Introduction to the Third Edition.” The ten women who penned short essays for this introduction were Norma Alarcón, Julia Alvarez, Paola Bacchetta, Rusty Barcelo, Norma Ella Cantú, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, T. Jackie Cuevas, Claire Joysmith, and AnaLouise Keating.
Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.”
In her introduction to Making Face, Making Soul, Anzaldúa writes, “Because there is little publication support for our writings, I’ve made a special effort to work with women who do not consider themselves writers, or at least not yet. The book provides space for some ethnic mestizas who have been silenced before uttering a word, or, having spoken, have not been heard” (“Haciendo Caras, Una Entrada,” xvii).
Anzaldúa, xvii–xviii.
Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 232.
Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 60.
Diana Bowen discusses the role of the visual within Anzaldúa’s system of theorizing: “When describing her process, Anzaldúa explains that she starts with a feeling, an experience for which she may not have the language to describe. She might then employ an artistic medium such as drawing a picture or writing poetry or fiction. Once this item is created, she may go back and name the experience using academic language” (“Gloria Anzaldúa”).
Anzaldúa’s approach in creating images and in presenting them in many ways reflects Sonja K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin’s feminist concept of “invitational rhetoric” whereby “invitational rhetoric constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter the rhetor’s world and to see it as the rhetor does. . . . Rhetors recognize the valuable contributions audience members can make to the rhetors’ own thinking and understanding” (“Beyond Persuasion,” 5–6). Since Foss and Griffin articulated the concept in 1995, it has remained important in the discourse. Anzaldúa’s writings often get cited by rhetorical scholars engaging ideas of invitational rhetoric, including in Foss and Griffin’s recent volume Inviting Understanding, so it might be worthwhile asking how her images can be read as embodying invitational rhetoric as well.
Bowen, “Gloria Anzaldúa.”
Anzaldúa, Gloria Anzaldúa Reader; Bost, “Messy Archives and Materials That Matter.” Bost later transformed her essay into a chapter on Anzaldúa in her most recent book, Shared Selves.
Anzaldúa, “Counsels from the Firing,” 265.
Benjamin, “‘Archive of Accounts,’” 48.
Moraga and Anzaldúa, “Introduction, 1981,” xlvi.
“Third World Feminist Speakers List.”
“Third World Feminist Speakers List.”
Bibliographies have historically been a vital tool for marginalized people to gather and make visible writings that represent their experiences, as recent critical conversations in Black bibliography have illuminated. See McHenry, To Make Negro Literature; and Goldsby and McGill, “Black Bibliography.”
Although Anzaldúa and Moraga did attempt to highlight prior work in these areas with the inclusion of the bibliography, some scholars have critiqued the level of attention given to the anthology. For example, Norma Alarcón has been critical of how white feminists have lavished attention on This Bridge while ignoring the rich history of writing and activism among women of color, both those connected to the book and preceding its publication (“Theoretical Subject[s]”). In her introduction to The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, AnaLouise Keating reflects on the legacy of This Bridge: “Although some scholars describe This Bridge as women of color’s entry into the feminist movement, I see the book somewhat differently, as a crucial reminder that feminism was not and never had been a ‘white’-raced women’s movement with a single-issue, middle-class agenda. Anzaldúa and the other contributors self-identified as feminists, and most had done so for many years before This Bridge’s publication. In This Bridge Called My Back, they remind readers that feminism, defined broadly and flexibly, offers crucial points of connection for social-justice workers of diverse backgrounds” (8). Additionally, Cynthia G. Franklin has done research “resituating This Bridge in relation to [its] historical contexts,” detailing how a rich ecosystem of lesbian and feminist work, particularly by women of color, influenced This Bridge (“Another 1981,” 32).
In response to this and other erasures, recent scholars of color have been working to recuperate and acknowledge the vital work of women of color in this period. Erica Townsend-Bell has shown how the profusion of work by women of color in the 1980s was preceded and made possible by women of color in the 1960s and 1970s (“Writing the Way to Feminism”). María Cotera has done similar work recuperating forgotten Chicana activists from those decades through her Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory Project and Archive that interviews these women and digitizes their personal libraries and records of activism (“‘Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster’”). The recent anthology Chicana Movidas, which Cotera edited with Maylei Blackwell and Dionne Espinoza, further broadened that work.
Simply put, women of color were active in building networks preceding and contemporaneous to This Bridge. Across the women’s movement in the 1970s, women of color were actively building spaces that would foster their creative works. This work was vital because they felt their needs were ignored, as illustrated in an earlier chapter by the Black female character of Edie featured in Roberta Gregory’s Dynamite Damsels who was quickly sidelined when she asked about the whiteness of the feminist movement in her consciousness-raising group. Indeed, essays like the “Combahee River Collective Statement” identified the needs of Black women that had been ignored and were created in dialogue with newly formed groups designed to address these needs. Such works and the groups they were created within continued to inspire the women involved and others to create publications and networks to voice the needs of a larger coalition of women of color. Barbara Smith, a member of the Combahee River Collective, kept working and advocating for Black women and women of color more broadly through collective endeavors like coediting Conditions Five: The Black Women’s Issue with Lorraine Bethel and founding Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in 1980, which published a number of significant books centering the voices of women of color, including her own, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, a revised and updated version of Conditions Five. This Bridge would go on to reprint the “Combahee River Collective Statement,” as well as publishing a dialogue between Smith and her twin sister Beverly about “their experiences as Black feminists in the Women’s Movement” (111).
More broadly, across the intertwined worlds of art and activism, women of color were engaged in network building across the 1970s and into the 1980s. In the visual arts, women of color were forming groups like Where We At (formed in 1971), Las Mujeres Muralistas (formed early 1970s), the Indigenous Women’s Network and Artistas Indigenas (both founded in 1983), and the Asian American Women Artists Association (founded in 1989), which created communities for Black, Chicana, Indigenous, and Asian American female artists to help facilitate their art and provide mutual support, while groups like the Guerrilla Girls (formed in 1985) famously advocated against sexism and racism in the art world and worked for the inclusion of such art in gallery and museum spaces. In the literary arts, women of color presses—like Third Woman Press (founded 1979), Kitchen Table, and Aunt Lute (founded 1982)—were formed as a response to the need for these spaces outside the mainstream and in distinction from the almost completely white feminist presses. The failure of feminist presses to support women of color was epitomized by the literal bankruptcy of Persephone Press, which threatened the survival and distribution of the newly published This Bridge Called My Back in 1981 and canceled plans to publish Home Girls, galvanizing the newly formed Kitchen Table, which would release a second edition of This Bridge in 1983, the same year Home Girls was eventually published.
This chapter comes at a moment when scholars are calling for a reassessment of Anzaldúa’s work, given that so much scholarship focuses narrowly on parts of her oeuvre and that her archives, with their plethora of unpublished materials, open up new avenues for consideration. In her work reassessing Anzaldúa’s legacy through her archives, Suzanne Bost writes, “The Anzaldúa that most people know is limited to a few famous essays, but the poems, stories, pictures, revisions, and other materials in the archive overturn some of the conclusions of those essays. I found in the archive a very different body of work, one that thematizes urban dwelling, spirituality, science fiction, shape-shifting, illness, and the author’s reluctance to share her sexuality with others” (“Messy Archives and Materials That Matter,” 627). There have been many reassessments of Anzaldúa’s contributions following her death, including in edited collections and special issues of journals. Moreover, the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa was founded after Anzaldúa’s passing, and its conferences provide the material for the “El Mundo Zurdo” series of volumes containing new assessments of Anzaldúa’s import. See Keating, Entre Mundos; Keating and González-López, Bridging; Cantú, “Comparative Perspectives Symposium”; Cantú et al., El Mundo Zurdo; Saldívar-Hull et al., El Mundo Zurdo 2; Mercado-López, Saldívar-Hull, and Castañeda, El Mundo Zurdo 3; Cuevas, Mercado-López, and Saldívar-Hull, El Mundo Zurdo 4; Perez, Mercado-López, and Saldívar-Hull, El Mundo Zurdo 5; Ramírez, Mercado-López, and Saldívar-Hull, El Mundo Zurdo 6; Ramírez, Mercado-López, and Saldívar-Hull, El Mundo Zurdo 7; and Zaytoun, Shapeshifting Subjects.
Bost, “Messy Archives and Materials That Matter”; Keating, “Archival Alchemy and Allure.”
Eichhorn, “Archival Genres.”
Keating, “Archival Alchemy and Allure,” 161.
Keating, 160–61.
Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 178.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2007 ed.), 82; Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 52–54; Anzaldúa and Torres, “The Author Never Existed,” 122; Blackwell and Anzaldúa, “Many Roads, One Path,” 113–15.
Eichhorn, “Archival Genres”; Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 178.
Anzaldúa, “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar, or Island,” 147.
Anzaldúa, “Counsels from the Firing,” 264. Contemporaneous to this piece, Anzaldúa also defines being a bridge in similar terms in her preface to this bridge we call home, saying, “To bridge means loosening our borders, not closing off to others. Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without. To step across the threshold is to be stripped of the illusion of safety because it moves us into unfamiliar territory and does not grant safe passage. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded” (3).
See chapter 1, in particular, on how grassroots archives preserve marginalized histories and the conversation that has arisen about this function, including Rebecka Taves Sheffield’s intensive study of four LGBTQ grassroots archives, Documenting Rebellions, which reveals previously unknown historical details about these institutions.
Cotera, “‘Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster’”; Cotera, “Unpacking Our Mothers’ Libraries”; Cotera, “Nuestra Autohistoria.”
Cotera, “‘Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster,’” 787; Cotera, “Nuestra Autohistoria,” 489–90.
Cotera, “Unpacking Our Mothers’ Libraries.”
Cotera, Blackwell, and Espinoza, “Introduction,” 2.
Cotera, “Unpacking Our Mothers’ Libraries,” 300.
Cotera, “‘Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster,’” 796–98.
Herrera Rodríguez, “Sacred Thing That Takes Us Home,” 280.
Herrera Rodríguez, 280.
Cotera, “Unpacking Our Mothers’ Libraries,” 300.
Cotera, “‘Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster,’” 783. Kate Eichhorn makes a similar statement about the archives as a site of “knowledge production” when she writes, “Rather than a destination for knowledges already produced or a place to recover histories and ideas placed under erasure, the making of archives is frequently where knowledge production begins” (Archival Turn in Feminism, 3).
Koegeler-Abdi, “Shifting Subjectivities,” 74.
Keating, “Introduction,” 10.
This concept is one that she continued to evolve across her career: “Her later theories transform the Borderlands into nepantla, new mestizas into nepantlera and nos/otras, and mestiza consciousness into conocimiento” (Keating, 10).
In a 1995 interview with María Henríquez Betancor, Anzaldúa explains her decision to give up on being a visual artist when she opted instead to pursue her writing: “When I decided to become a writer I had to give up the idea of doing visual art—not enough time to practice and be good in two art forms, to buy oil paints, brushes, and other art materials. At that time I looked around to see what other Chicanas were writing and I found very little” (Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 236).
Bowen, “Gloria Anzaldúa.” Granted, thinking and drawing are also often linked and not separate processes for Anzaldúa, as this chapter bears out.
Blackwell and Anzaldúa, “Many Roads, One Path,” 111. In her 2001 foreword to This Bridge, Anzaldúa discusses how the “seed” for the collection came out of her coursework and teaching at UT Austin (“Counsels from the Firing,” 262), and she also affirms how this period inspired the work of Borderlands / La Frontera in a 1990 interview with Hector A. Torres (“Author Never Existed,” 135).
Blackwell and Anzaldúa, “Many Roads, One Path,” 115.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2007 ed.), 82.
Blackwell and Anzaldúa, “Many Roads, One Path,” 113. See also her discussion of leaving the doctoral program at UT Austin in Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 52–54; and Anzaldúa and Torres, “Author Never Existed,” 122.
Anzaldúa recounts in a 1982 interview with Linda Smuckler, “I used to teach ‘The Mujer Chicana’ at UT Austin. They banned that course a few years after I left because they said it was divisive of men and women in the Chicano movement” (Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 54).
Blackwell and Anzaldúa, “Many Roads, One Path,” 115.
Blackwell and Anzaldúa, 111; Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 54.
Anzaldúa, 54.
Anzaldúa, “Notebook and Journal on La Mujer Xicana: September 16, 1976.”
In a 1995 telephone interview with Ann E. Reuman, Anzaldua describes reading the work of white feminists like Kate Millet, Robin Morgan, and Judy Grahn in the mid-1970s before she started graduate school, saying, “I had the experience but I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it, and these white feminists gave me the vocabulary. And once I had the vocabulary, then I had to start thinking of, developing my own, using my own cultural words and symbols and images.” This moment in the interview follows her discussion of the need for This Bridge, and she then goes on to discuss the literature by women of color, and Black women in particular, that had an influence on her later thought. Reuman and Anzaldúa, “Coming into Play,” 37–40.
Anzaldúa, “Gay Fiction, East and West, Prof Teele, Spring 1977: February 27, 1977.”
It is important to note that Rich later became an advocate and supporter of Anzaldúa’s work and the work of other women of color, as many scholars have examined.
This mysticism is present across Anzaldúa’s work, but take a look at the “Tlilli, Tlapalli: The Path of the Red and Black Ink” chapter in Borderlands (2007 ed.), in which she talks at length about the vital and spiritual role of images.
Anzaldúa, “Gay Fiction, East and West, Prof Teele, Spring 1977: March 8, 1977.”
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2007 ed.), 60.
Anzaldúa, 61.
Cade, “Gloria Anzaldúa in Front of Her Drawings.”
Cade, “Gloria Anzaldúa,” 25.
Anzaldúa, “En Rapport, in Opposition” (1987 ed.); Anzaldúa, “En Rapport, in Opposition” (1990 ed.).
Anzaldúa, “En Rapport, in Opposition” (1987 ed.), 14.
In discussing her use of images in various interviews, Anzaldúa often describes them in great detail. Here are some of her evocations of images related to mestiza identity that she developed across her career, even before she began preserving them on transparencies and reusing them. In a 1990 interview with Hector A. Torres, Anzaldúa describes the mestiza figure as we later see it replicated across her transparencies: “In my lectures, I always insist on having a blackboard because I like to make what I call my hieroglyphics or these little pictures out of which I can explicate my theory. For Borderlands, I had the figure of a woman with all these little squares that were the plots that she was standing on. One plot was being a lesbian. Another plot was being in the academy. Another was being a working campesina, working-class. Another was feminist. Another one was the writing profession. As many worlds as there are and the mestiza has to operate in all these little plots, in all these little worlds. So, in crossing from one to the other, in this constant traveling back and forth, her subjectivity, her identity becomes multiple, moving, movable subjectivity or identity” (“Author Never Existed,” 130–31). In a 1999 interview with Karin Ikas reprinted in the back of the third edition of Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa describes how her “little drawings” serve to help her articulate her thinking in writing. She lists some of these images, which show up across her transparencies, demonstrating how she reproduces the images for her audience that also help her articulate her written concepts in the first place: “The way that I originate my ideas is the following: First there has to be something that is bothering me, something emotional so that I will be upset, angry or conflicted. Then I start meditating on it, sometimes I do that while I am walking. Usually I come up with something visual of what I am feeling. So then I have a visual that sometimes is like a bridge, sometimes like a person with fifty legs, one in each world; sometimes la mano izquierda, the left-handed world; the rebollino, et cetera, and I try to put that into words. So behind this feeling there is this image, this visual, and I have to figure out what the articulation of this image is. That’s how I get into the theory. I start theorizing about it. But it always comes from a feeling” (“Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa,” 235–36).
Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, 200.
Anzaldúa, “Transparency: Model.”
I briefly discuss the concept of invitational rhetoric in an earlier note in this chapter. See also Foss and Griffin, “Beyond Persuasion”; Foss and Griffin, Inviting Understanding.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2007 ed.), 99.
Diana Isabel Bowen has written about Anzaldúa’s visual language in her scholarship, asserting, “Anzaldúa’s theory of the borderlands contains imagistic elements, that is, she uses vivid imagery and examples to describe her concepts” (“Gloria Anzaldúa”). Laura E. Pérez has further written about the visual elements in the text of Borderlands / La Frontera, positing, “In Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, image and written or spoken word are inseparably linked, as image and spoken word are in the functioning of the Mesoamerican glyph (pictograph/ideogram). . . . From Anzaldúa’s cultural perspective, writing is an image-making practice, that as such can indeed shape and transform what we imagine, are able to perceive, and are able to give material embodiment. Understood, therefore, is the great responsibility and sacredness of the very real and consequential ‘transformative power’ wielded by the image-makers, which literally ‘makes face, makes soul’ in a reading process understood to be part of a larger performance” (“Spirit Glyphs,” 50).
Anzaldúa, “Transparency: Nos/Otras Disrupts”; Anzaldúa, “Transparency: Artista Activista”; Anzaldúa, “Transparency: Mestizas Partake.”
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2007 ed.), 30, 45. In some of her transparencies, Anzaldúa further focuses on these ethnic roots through visualizing this tree, echoing the moment in Borderlands, as well, where the mestiza is “digging her way along the roots of trees” to find her cultural inheritance (104).
Emphasizing the strain of this negotiation is a labeled turtle at the front of her path. Like the turtle, she carries around her identity, but she drags it at her feet instead. This animal is not simply evocative in this transparency, but also in Borderlands / La Frontera in an earlier section of the text where Anzaldúa discusses the “native cultural roots” of Chicanas and encapsulates her point by stating, “I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry ‘home’ on my back” (43). In the transparency, too, the turtle echoes and evokes the mestiza in a tidy, compact form, all the tangled, conflicting identities that the mestiza wades through here bundled up under the shell.
Anzaldúa, “Transparency: Nos/Otras Somos Mestizas Todas”; Anzaldúa, “Transparency: White Frame of Reference.”
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2007 ed.), 101.
Anzaldúa, 109.
Anzaldúa, “Counsels from the Firing,” 265.
Anzaldúa, “Transparency: Under the Sky of Feminism”; Anzaldúa, “Transparency: The Politics of Writing & Reading.”
Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2007 ed.), 106.
Anzaldúa, 106–7.
Sharpe, “Anzaldúa across Borders.”
Eichhorn, “Archival Genres.”
5. The Photographer and Curator
The slide count of The Ballad ranges slightly across various sources, which attests to the shifting nature of the slideshow itself. Darsie Alexander lists the Whitney Museum of American Art’s copy of the work as containing “approximately seven hundred color slides” (“Nan Goldin,” 107), Greil Marcus brings the tally up to “more than seven hundred color photographs” (“Songs Left Out,” 76), and Goldin herself accounts for “750 images shown in 45 minutes” (Westfall, “Ballad of Nan Goldin,” 31). Further, it is important to note that although The Ballad became a printed text in 1986, it continued as a living, growing slideshow in the years after although the general construct remained the same. See Holert, “Nan Goldin Talks to Tom Holert,” 232.
Marvin Heiferman, one of her editorial collaborators on the book and in her early career, notes the count as 127, which includes her paratextual photos of Greer Lankton and Robert Vitale with the title page and the photo of her sister Barbara in the introductory text. Pérez and Heiferman, “Original Ballad,” 55.
In the 1996 afterword to The Ballad, she writes, “I realize I took the picture of myself battered so I wouldn’t go back to the man who beat me up” (“Afterword,” 1996 ed., 145).
Editors, “Editors’ Note,” 21.
Robbins, Sienkiewicz, and Triptow, Strip AIDS USA.
Robbins, Sienkiewicz, and Triptow; Robbins, Last Girl Standing, 184.
Ellis et al., Caught Looking (1986 ed.). Goldin’s photography also appeared in Vance, Pleasure and Danger, a volume of essays that originated in the Barnard Sex Conference as discussed in the first chapter.
In retrospective accounts, Goldin remembers reading the first major newspaper article about HIV/AIDS—by Lawrence K. Altman, published in the New York Times in July 1981—with her artist friends Cookie Mueller and David Armstrong while they were spending the July Fourth holiday on Fire Island, a famed gay and lesbian New York beach destination. They “laughed it off” at the time but soon realized its severity as their loved ones started to die, with Goldin marking the death of one of Armstrong’s lovers in 1982 as the “first friend” to be lost. Goldin, “‘Nan Goldin on Cookie Mueller’”; Altman, “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”
Dubin, “AIDS,” 210.
Junge, Art about AIDS, 38; O’Neill-Butler, “Out of Sheer Rage,” 98.
A number of artists in Witnesses also appear in the book version of The Ballad, including Jane Dickson, Greer Lankton, Mark Morrisroe, Vittorio Scarpati, and Kiki Smith. Cookie Mueller’s writing appears in the exhibit catalog. Additionally, some of the artists, including David Armstrong, Siobhan Liddell, Stephen Tashjian, Shellburne Thurber, and David Wojnarowicz, appear in other photographs by Goldin from the period, including in the slideshow version of The Ballad. Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986 ed.), 29, 41, 60, 92–93, 99, 102, 123; Goldin and Armstrong, Double Life, 105, 110, 122–23, 128–29; Goldin, Couples and Loneliness, 59–64.
She would also produce new photographs on HIV/AIDS by documenting the decline of friends who were HIV positive and contribute to and curate other focused exhibits on the topic. Perlson, “Nan Goldin.”
Goldin, Other Side, 7. These remarks from 1992 are reprinted in a new and expanded 2019 edition of the project and precede a new preface where AIDS and the losses of many people in her photos and community loom even larger across the whole of her remarks. See also Goldin, 8–9.
Goldin, “Afterword” (1996 ed.); Goldin, “Afterword” (2012 ed.); Goldin, “Afterword” (2021 ed.).
Townsend, “Nan Goldin,” 109.
Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1996 ed.), 8–9.
Goldin, 9.
Goldin, 9.
Oksman, “Mourning the Family Album,” 238.
Goldin, Other Side, 5; Coulthard and Goldin, I’ll Be Your Mirror.
Pérez and Heiferman, “Original Ballad,” 56.
Pinckney and Goldin, “Ballad of Nan Goldin,” 25; Bengal, “Conversation with Nan Goldin.”
Dubin, “AIDS.”
Lubow, Diane Arbus, 120.
Pinckney and Goldin, “Ballad of Nan Goldin,” 31; Coulthard and Goldin, I’ll Be Your Mirror.
Pinckney and Goldin, “Ballad of Nan Goldin,” 30.
Sontag, On Photography; Barthes, Camera Lucida.
Baumann, “Introduction,” xx; Laing, “Fold in Time,” 94. To read more on HIV/AIDS archives, check out Marika Cifor’s Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS, where she deftly examines the major archives, including Fales and the New York Public Library, that have preserved the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its activisms.
Cifor, 4.
Laing, “Fold in Time,” 94.
Precup, “Wound Which Speaks”; Oksman, “Mourning the Family Album”; Prosser, “Testimonies in Light”; Raymond, “Performances”; Ruddy, “‘Radiant Eye Yearns from Me’”; Townsend, “Nan Goldin.”
In her 1992 preface reprinted in the new edition of The Other Side, Goldin says, “As a bisexual person, for me the third gender seems to be the ideal,” as she discusses her transgender friends (7). In an overview of her career, she further expounds on how the social circle of drag queens resonated with feeling in-between as a bisexual woman: “Drag queens in the early 1970’s in Boston were totally alienated from both the homosexual and the heterosexual communities and lived a real underground existence. I lived with them for a few years and I wanted to be a queen. I love queens because they’re the most beautiful people in the world. And they’re perfect for a bisexual person” (Couples and Loneliness, 20). In the preface to The Ballad, she discusses how her inclinations toward both genders often seem paradoxical: “I often feel that I am better suited to be with a woman; my long-term friendships with women are bonds that have the intensity of a marriage, or the closeness of sisters. But a part of me is challenged by the opacity of men’s emotional makeup and is stimulated by the conflict inherent in relationships between men and women” (1996 ed., 8).
Pinckney, “Nan’s Manhattan,” 204. Writer Lucy Sante also reflected on Goldin’s capacity for making a large network of friends in her essay in I’ll Be Your Mirror: “Nan was a social evangelist; she introduced whole crowds to each other. She seemed to have met more people in a few months than most of us had managed over the course of years” (“All Yesterday’s Parties,” 99).
Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1996 ed.), 109; Costa and Goldin, Nan Goldin, 16. Goldin also includes this image in the middle of the section of her photographs from this period that she publishes in The Other Side, which features her photographs of drag queens and trans women from across her career (26–27).
Goldin, Other Side, 10–39.
Wyatt et al., “Catalog.”
Goldin, Other Side, 8.
Marcus, “Songs Left Out,” 76, 79.
Westfall, “Ballad of Nan Goldin,” 31.
Marcus, “Songs Left Out,” 76.
Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1996 ed.), 19, 53.
McCloud, Understanding Comics, 65–69.
The most photographed person in the book version of The Ballad is Brian, with fourteen photos. Fletcher follows with eleven, then Goldin with eight.
Als, “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress.”
Sante, “All Yesterday’s Parties,” 99; Pinckney, “Nan’s Manhattan,” 203.
Sante, “All Yesterday’s Parties,” 99; Pinckney, “Nan’s Manhattan,” 203–4.
Pérez and Heiferman, “Original Ballad,” 55; Als, “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress.”
Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1996 ed.), 16, 17, 33, 87, 121.
Goldin, 23, 35, 42.
Goldin, 19, 25.
Goldin, 43.
Goldin, 16.
Als, “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress.”
Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1996 ed.), 83; Costa and Goldin, Nan Goldin, 46–47. A number of scholars spend time discussing this photograph, including Claire Raymond, who takes a number of paragraphs to excavate its significance to Goldin’s oeuvre. Raymond, “Performances,” 125–27; Dean, “Intimacy at Work”; Kaplan, “Photography and the Exposure of Community”; Prosser, “Testimonies in Light.”
Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1996 ed.), 147.
Goldin, 87.
Guido Costa provides this quote from a review without an attribution in his short analysis of the photo. Costa and Goldin, Nan Goldin, 48–49.
Goldin, Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1996 ed.), 99; Avena and Goldin, “Interview with Nan Goldin,” 155.
In an interview, Goldin discusses Mueller’s diagnosis and how she coped by “medicat[ing] herself with various herbs” and “writ[ing] a column called ‘Ask Dr. Mueller’ for High Times magazine as a home-remedy doctor.” Avena and Goldin, 155.
Wyatt et al., “Catalog.”
Goldin, Couples and Loneliness, 76.
Avena and Goldin, “Interview with Nan Goldin,” 154.
Dubin, “AIDS,” 210.
Sussman, “In/of Her Time,” 38.
Wyatt et al., “Catalog,” 4.
“Flyer”; “Visual AIDS.”
Wyatt et al., “Catalog,” 3; “Visual AIDS.”
Wyatt et al., “Catalog,” 7; Deparle, “111 Held in St. Patrick’s AIDS Protest.”
Wyatt et al., “Catalog,” 6.
Wyatt et al., “Catalogue Drafts.”
Wyatt, “Attendance Records.”
Als, “Nan Goldin’s Life in Progress.”
Wyatt et al., “Catalog,” 5.
Avena and Goldin, “Interview with Nan Goldin,” 151–52.
Wyatt et al., “Catalog,” 11. See also Hubbard, United in Anger; and France, How to Survive a Plague.
Fellow downtown artists James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook also memorialized Wojnarowicz in the coming decade in Seven Miles a Second, a richly vibrant comic that draws heavily on his written memoirs and visual artwork in recounting his life. Wojnarowicz, Romberger, and Van Cook, Seven Miles a Second.
Avena and Goldin, “Interview with Nan Goldin,” 151.
In the exhibit itself, Wojnarowicz included a series of three black-and-white photographs that showed Hujar just after his death in 1987. See “Artists Checklist.”
Wyatt et al., “Catalog,” 5.
Kastor, “Content.”
O’Neill-Butler, “Out of Sheer Rage,” 98.
Epilogue
Hubert, “Behind the Camera.”
I touch on my archival research process in the acknowledgments.
Rubin, Deviations; Smith, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody; Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back (2015 ed.); Moraga and Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back (2021 ed.); Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark; Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera (2021 ed.).
Murray, Mixed Media; Springer, Living for the Revolution; Blackwell, ¡Chicana Power!; Harker and Konchar Farr, This Book Is an Action; Hogan, Feminist Bookstore Movement; Beins, Liberation in Print; Groeneveld and Thrift, “Thinking beyond Backlash”; Jordan and Meagher, “Feminist Periodical Studies”; Harker, Lesbian South; McKinney, Information Activism.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I compiled a list of open-access digitized media for my students learning about archival research and grassroots media; see Galvan, “Resource.”
Some students also encountered difficulties where other Wikipedians flagged their entries for deletion, saying that the figures were not notable enough, continuing the marginalization of these important subcultural artists.