Visualizing Collective Action

Across the 1980s, women in feminist and gay and lesbian movements in the United States celebrated their sexuality as one of the interlocking parts of their identity in response to constraining cultural phenomena like the feminist sex wars, conservative political norms, and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Forty years later, we widely remember their words in essays, manifestos, and march chants, as they shifted the feminist movement toward the sex-positive third wave and participated in gay and lesbian organizing that fed into groups like ACT UP, Queer Nation, and Lesbian Avengers. By contrast, we have overlooked how women wielded images to theorize their embodied sexuality directly, and their art, created within grassroots networks, has been mostly forgotten. The eight artists I study in this book collectively depicted sexuality by embedding their own individual experiences within a larger framework. Through collages, cartoons, drawings, and photographs, Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson, Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin represented their own perspectives and those of a wider range of people around them in order to document the intersectional diversity of bodies and sexual identities that made up their communities. Within the past twenty years, newly processed collections within archives have begun to make these women’s powerful visual contributions available once more.

And yet, visibility is tenuous and not guaranteed. These women exist in visible archives, both present and precarious. The paradox of this book’s title reflects the hard-won and narrowly kept conditions of visibility for diverse sexual identities. As the artists featured in this book were trying to make their lives and sexualities visible, they were facing censorship and critique, even from within their own movements. The call was all too often coming from inside the house. Further, we are at a historic moment now where a number of the social advances discussed in this book are on the verge of collapse, underlining just how much women’s sexuality and LGBTQ identity remain both dangerous and revolutionary. These women and countless others are preserved in visible archives, but their memory and legacy are not guaranteed. It is my hope that recovering the grassroots tactics for how these artists made their communities visible and advocated for their rights amid unprecedented adversity may inspire future activists.

By building worlds around their individual experiences, the artists analyzed in this book insisted that their experiences be seen and valued as universal. Their art functions as collective autobiography in how they drew themselves within a larger community and then welcomed others to imagine themselves within that world. By foregrounding the importance of community in their visual representations, their approaches encouraged women and LGBTQ viewers who encountered their work to reflect on their own experiences of sexuality and feel like they were part of something larger than themselves. The artists deployed these visual tactics not only to bring people together in community, but also to recognize how their own individual work grew out of, reflected, and was supported by a collective of individuals.

The career trajectory of each of the artists in this book shows how they anticipated later developments in feminist as well as gay and lesbian thinking and artwork. This forward-looking artwork sometimes set them at odds with their contemporaries, but the community they invoked supported their values in future years. Though repudiated in their time during the feminist sex wars, the precepts of the sex-positive feminists were woven into the fabric of the third wave in the 1990s and the visual style of the artists behind the censored Diary (1982) from the Barnard Sex Conference—Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson—prefigured the DIY style behind zines that would become so popular during the riot grrrl movement in the 1990s. Moreover, the lesbian and bisexual content within the underground comix movement as captured in solo works by Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs would find a home and flourish in the Gay Comix series of the 1980s and 1990s and facilitate a lesbian comics boom among a new generation of artists in the 1990s. From its local beginnings in the pages of grassroots newspapers in the 1980s, Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip would become such a subcultural phenomenon that many young women in the 1990s and beyond would tell Bechdel they learned what it meant to be a lesbian from the strip. Gloria Anzaldúa’s editorial work with This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and individual writing in Borderlands / La Frontera (1987) were immediately successful and would continue to be so in subsequent years as she was invited to talk at multiple public lectures annually, where she illustrated her popular concepts in drawings that have not yet been examined as vital sites of visual theorization and community formation. At the time that Nan Goldin began to show her photography in the 1980s, color photography was not standard in the high art world, but her work and its snapshot aesthetic became widely influential in subsequent years, such that the groundbreaking, defiant nature of her formal choices is no longer as immediately apparent to modern eyes.

They created their work against the backdrop of the 1980s, which began with some measure of hope to continue to build on the social progress that feminists and those invested in gay liberation had achieved in the 1970s. As the Village People put it in “Ready for the 80’s” (1979), a party anthem send-up in anticipation of the new decade, “In the eighties we will travel far / We will realize just who we are / We can move as one.” Despite external challenges like the election of conservative Ronald Reagan in November 1980 and internal fractures within social movements, artists rallied the spirit of collective possibility in their work.

In this vein, Mary Wilshire’s one-page comic from early in the decade that appeared in After/Shock: Bulletins from Ground Zero! (1981) speaks to its moment in time, encapsulating the potential for social change that the major artists in this book would embrace with their art (Figure I.1).1 Here, a topless, masked superheroine breaks the fourth wall, interrupting a series of short strips on earlier pages where white women objectify men in office settings and claiming the final page for a public service announcement. Across the top row of panels the superheroine calls for political reengagement, and the following nine panels depict more than a dozen different individuals—diverse in terms of their race, sexuality, profession, and age—gathering to collectively rally for social justice. These figures present a stark contrast to the upwardly mobile white women seen on earlier pages, who have effectively leaned in for their own advancement but have forgotten about the cause. Together, these diverse individuals identify a wide range of pressing social issues—racial equality, abortion, nondiscrimination of homosexuality, freedom of erotic art—that need attention. In a contemporary review of the comic that appeared in The Comics Journal (1982), Bill Sherman reads Wilshire’s piece as “reemphasiz[ing] the initial feminist impetus behind” women’s comics, reminding the “white-collar class of women” of “the movement that opened many offices for them.”2 Within the comic itself, Wilshire identifies the need for renewed political activism due to the election of Ronald Reagan, who took office as U.S. president at the beginning of 1981, by having a female newscaster intone, “These are radical privileges—and they’re in jeopardy. Just look at the eyes of Nancy Reagan!” The superheroine demarcates the new decade as another opportunity for change if people pay attention and join together. Like a lot of the art discussed in this book, this comic was produced within grassroots networks and is all but forgotten today, but it underlines the power of visual art to advocate for social change.

All these women’s artwork shaped feminist futures, but how they mobilized image and text together to plant the seeds for future community to bloom has been overlooked, such that the full impact of their feminist community-building tactics has yet to be assessed. This book is that reckoning, connecting the dots from the past to the present by unpacking the powerful collective potential of visual rhetoric, contextualizing it within its time, and tracing its influence forward through the archives that preserved these artworks and made them available for research. Throughout their careers, these artists actively conceived of their own work as documenting and preserving sexual experience at a time when many feminists were uncovering the forgotten work of earlier influential women artists and others were endeavoring to build archives of their own. The following two sections outline how this book engages both visual analysis and archives in order to recover the political impact of these women’s artwork.

From Sequence to Collectivity: Theorizing Comics and Other Image–Text Artworks

The visual forms I analyze across five chapters—multimedia collage, comic books, newspaper comic strips and spot graphics, notebook doodles and transparency drawings, and photographs—allowed women to represent and examine the sexuality of their bodies within feminist as well as gay and lesbian movements, but these formats have often been ignored as crucial sites of theoretical engagement. The fusion of image and text together within these artworks is especially powerful as it allowed women to control the conversation through both of these registers. Not only were they able to visualize diverse bodies on their own terms, but they also supplied textual commentary that foregrounded their own interpretations rather than letting anyone else speak over or for them.

To analyze the critical heft of these images and their multilayered relationships to text, I deploy close reading that is informed by my training in comics studies. As fellow comics scholar Ramzi Fawaz observes, “Comics is an object of inquiry that invites or elicits a method of reading for multiplicity. Put simply, comics teaches us to read lots of different things—words, images, aesthetic styles, characters, panels, colors, textures, formats, and page layouts—in lots of different sequences, patterns, and juxtapositions: in a single panel, on a full page, between and across pages in a narrative arc, and often across numerous serial installments.”3 This interactive “multiplicity” embedded in how we look at comics guides my analysis throughout the book. By coining the term comicity, which denotes comics-like properties inherent in other works of art, Colin Beineke offers terminology for a comics-focused way to engage analytically with other artistic formats that would benefit from similar image–text analysis or that have properties that align them with comics in some way.4 Indeed, all the artworks in this book benefit from a comicitous analysis where I investigate the multilayered relationships between image and text, considering their spatial orientations on the page and how they are sequenced together to formulate a larger collective. Gathering these works into one artistic lineage allows us to draw connections between how women leveraged the affordances of their different art forms in order to assemble a visual vocabulary of sexuality and embodiment within the feminist and gay and lesbian movements.5

These women’s artworks often appeared in collective publication contexts like newspapers and anthologies, where other words and images interacted with and shaped the interpretation of their pieces. In her scholarship about the important role that periodicals played in feminist movement culture, Agatha Beins foregrounds how items on a single page spread or in an individual issue or publication were in dialogue with one another: “A piece about a local film festival could appear next to an announcement about an upcoming election and in the same issue as a page full of poetry, a graphic of a woman with her fist raised in a Black Power salute, and an editorial requesting help putting out the newsletter. . . . Discourses outside a particular article or image shape its meaning: a single issue is in conversation with previous issues and anticipates future ones.”6 In this book, I expand Beins’s premise about how to look capaciously at the content of a periodical to contextualize a range of visual culture as it was produced and disseminated in a wide variety of formats. For example, when a cartoonist like Alison Bechdel publishes her comics within specific grassroots newspapers or a photographer like Nan Goldin arranges her photos into a book with a textual preface that she pens, these publication venues frame our reading of the images and affect their reception and circulation both directly in the moment and indirectly thereafter.

By bringing together women who made art in different media, we can understand how visual formats were vital spaces of theorization within activist circles. This book builds on comics scholarship like that of Hillary Chute and Ramzi Fawaz, who have reshaped the critical landscape in the last ten years by centering women creators and queer perspectives.7 Also important is the social justice–minded work of scholars like Rebecca Beirne, andré carrington, Yetta Howard, and Darieck Scott who have engaged comics as a site of critical discourse within a larger ecosystem of many artistic forms.8 Together with these thinkers and others, my scholarship is part of an emerging subfield of queer comics studies that examines both LGBTQ creators as well as how the comics form itself can be queerly mobilized.9 While various scholars have engaged comics as local sites of activism, this book conceptualizes how diverse visual cultures (that include comics) were important to feminist as well as gay and lesbian movements.

In their depictions of women’s sexuality, each artist draws on the power of sequence, which is seen as one of the bedrock traits of comics. Cartoonist Will Eisner penned an early book analyzing the medium that he titled Comics and Sequential Art (1985), and Scott McCloud built from Eisner’s work when he defined comics as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” in Understanding Comics (1993).10 Both of these texts are foundational to the discipline, and McCloud’s work is one of the most cited and taught pieces of comics scholarship. When Chute engages how McCloud and others have foregrounded sequence in their definitions of comics, she observes that “the prioritizing of sequence allows for a rich history of forms, some of them ancient, such as cave paintings, to be understood as applicable to the history of comics,” a lineage that McCloud advocates for within his book.11 I mobilize sequence to underline the comicity of Alderfer’s, Jaker’s, and Nelson’s multimedia collages, Bechdel’s spot graphics, Anzaldúa’s drawings, and Goldin’s photographs and how they belong together in conversation with Marrs’s and Gregory’s comic books and Bechdel’s comic strips. 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.

Even more important, sequence allowed these artists to visualize collectivity, as Wilshire’s comic at the opening of this introduction demonstrates when she uses a single comics page to depict many women and LGBTQ individuals rallying together for social justice. By putting multiple images and people into sequence artists were able not only to create visibility for many identities and link these perspectives by forming them into a community, but also to welcome their audience into affinity with them. In McCloud’s book, he draws himself as a narrator on the page to create a connection with his reader, a tactic that some of these artists adapt, illustrating themselves or analogs of themselves among an even larger community populated by diverse individuals with whom readers can identify. All the artists created relationships among many images, but they at times defied “deliberate sequence” by rearranging, recontextualizing, and revising their images, speaking to how relationships between individuals and particularly individuals within social movements are always shifting and changing. In Fawaz’s scholarship, he sees comics sequence as “a site of open-ended multiplicity” that queer cartoonists can wield to “[express] and translat[e] shifting understandings of queer sexuality across time and in different cultural and political contexts.”12 In putting Fawaz’s insights together with mine, our embrace of sequence underlines how this formal characteristic can be deployed to celebrate how “people are different from each other,” one concept with which Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick helped launch the field of queer theory in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) by demonstrating the infinite differences (or sequences) within people as opposed to binary ways of thinking that would prefer to fix individuals into limited, knowable categories.13

Roberta Gregory invokes the power of sequence in her comic Dynamite Damsels (1976) to comment on the shifting norms in feminist culture in the late 1970s. On the back cover, she depicts the major characters in her comic together in one group in order to reimagine their relationships (Figure I.2).14 At a glance, this image of ten women standing under the banner “We’re women and we’re beautiful” is a utopian vision of a feminism that harmoniously gathers a diverse grouping of individuals. By depicting her protagonist, Frieda, hugging an anonymous woman whose shirt back proclaims, “And this includes YOU, too!” Gregory invites the reader to put her face on this woman and join the cause.

Despite the welcoming tone of the text, the image reveals how the whole group isn’t as accepting as they declare. At the edges of the image, we see the butch lesbian Doris shocking Marylou by grabbing her breast. Gregory’s narrative complicates our reading of Doris’s assault by showing how Marylou is consistently a source of oppression, threatened by Doris’s lesbianism and other women who are not like her. Throughout the comic, Marylou enacts microaggressions against other members of the group, including from the outset where the first words out of her mouth subtly attack Edie, a Black woman who is asking about the whiteness of the feminist movement, and derail the potential for a nuanced discussion about race in their consciousness-raising group.15 With this boob grab, Gregory irreverently signals that white women like Marylou who dominate the movement need to be woken out of complacency to recognize and value the individuality of the women around them. The shared, friendly facial expressions of all the other women on the page, including Marylou’s daughter, visualize the potential for feminist solidarity while simultaneously acknowledging that its reality is not a given, as Gregory’s narrative examines and as this back cover echoes. Marylou represents the straight white feminism that many women, including the artists in my book, organized in reaction to in the 1980s, in order to hold the movement accountable for the experiences of a broader range of women.

Beyond how the visual form of the works allowed artists to visualize and critique collectivity, their handmade materiality also contributed to welcoming the audience into movements for social justice. In Graphic Women (2010), Chute analyzes how the “rigorously handmade” quality of the women’s comics she studies establishes intimacy as “the subjective mark of the body is rendered directly onto the page and constitutes how we view the page.”16 Alongside comics studies, zine studies has been particularly adept at describing how the materiality of artwork was vital in forming community. The artists in this book produced their visual artwork in formats that emphasize their personal, handmade nature—the collage, the comic, the diary, the doodle, the grassroots newsletter, the snapshot. All these visual forms would later live side by side in zines. In her landmark study Girl Zines (2009), Alison Piepmeier articulates the concept of “embodied community”: how “zines’ materiality helps form a particular kind of connection between zine readers and creators.”17 As much as zine makers created connections on the page through the intimate, handmade nature of their content and its format, and solidified those connections by building postal networks of other individuals producing zines, so also did the artists in this book create and broadcast their content within communities in order to further develop these groups. In focusing on how each artist facilitated an “embodied community” through her work, I show how these artists were deliberate in designing and sharing their creations in specific ways that would highlight the larger community they were a part of and welcome new individuals into the fold.

Situating Collectivity in Women’s Lives and Archives

Over the past ten years, I have researched the artwork of these eight women in over a dozen grassroots archives and university special collections across the United States and drawn on some newly digitized resources as well. Attesting to how they touched on multiple discourses with their art, their work can be found in wide-ranging archival collections devoted to women’s history, sexuality, popular culture, ethnic studies, and art movements. By thinking across these many archives, I reconstitute the multivalent legacies of these women and examine the crucial role of the archives in how they preserve and shape our memory. My engagement with archives builds on the archival turn in critical theory, particularly the feminist and queer thinking on archives that has consolidated around the work of Ann Cvetkovich and Kate Eichhorn.18 When I discuss archives in this book, I mean archives in the very material and concrete sense that Michelle Caswell delineates as “collections of records, material and immaterial, analog and digital . . . , the institutions that steward them, the places where they are physically located, and the processes that designated them ‘archival.’”19 How archivists have welcomed these women’s artwork into collections has been vital in shaping their legacy.

The richness and nuance with which I can visually analyze and contextualize each artist’s work is thanks to how these materials have been preserved in archives. Because their art circulated in small numbers through grassroots and independent contexts in the late 1970s and 1980s, it has been mostly forgotten in the decades since. In this book, I engage the archives not only to examine the impact that the art made in its time, but to explore its continuing relevance as these materials migrated into archives to be preserved. Interference Archive, a grassroots archives formed in 2011 that collects the print culture of social movements, operates according to the principle of “preservation through use.” The organization makes activist art broadly available to organizers today so that they can learn about and draw strength from earlier generations of activists, which is so crucial particularly since activist histories are not always well documented.20 By making the art, histories, processes, and tactics of the artists I study more widely available through this book, I transform the ethos of the Interference Archive into a principle guiding my scholarship.

Through analyzing how the women’s artwork and artistic processes were shaped by other women involved in the social movements around them, this book fashions a vision of how collective investments undergirded their careers. A collective understanding of artistic production often remains as opaque to us today as it did to feminists in their time—as a group of women involved in the production of the feminist magazine Heresies lamented in the late 1970s, “We haven’t yet learned to analyze ‘women working together.’ . . . Women need to develop ways of thinking, looking, talking about our processes.”21 We are now in a moment when popular visual art forms like comics and photography are more widely dispersed throughout culture than ever before and often used for the purposes of social activism, such that it’s crucial we reconnect to and make these earlier visual activisms visible for new generations of artists. That is, I am reactivating these artists’ work for what they might tell us about collective activism in their time but also for how making visible this visual activism might inspire and shape future artwork.

In the past two decades, archivists have been critical in recruiting and processing collections containing the artwork of these women and other social movement materials from the 1970s and 1980s, making possible the recovery work of this book. In her groundbreaking monograph The Archival Turn in Feminism: Outrage in Order (2013), which has quickly become a touchstone for myself and many other scholars, Kate Eichhorn examines how “feminists born since the late 1960s” who entered the archival profession have become invested in preserving the traces of second- and third-wave feminism.22 She focuses the bulk of her analysis on a select group of archivists and librarians who have collected third-wave zines from the 1990s and related feminist ephemera in university collections, positing that “the archival turn in contemporary feminism is as much about shoring up a younger generation’s legacy and honoring elders as it is about imagining and working to build possible worlds in the present and for the future.”23 These same zine librarians and archivists—Kelly Wooten, Lisa Darms, and Jenna Freedman—and others—like Milo Miller and Christopher Wilde, who founded and run the grassroots Queer Zine Archive Project, and Karen Green, who serves as the comics curator of Columbia University—have been critical in my thinking about how radical visual materials are preserved within archives and remembered as a part of social movements and how the intersection between these two ideas shape their legacy.24 Their work in archives elevating marginalized voices and formats fits within the emerging field of critical archival studies, which “broadens the field’s scope beyond an inward, practice-centered orientation and builds a critical stance regarding the role of archives in the production of knowledge and different types of narratives, as well as identity construction.”25 How they thought through the challenges of developing collections replete with comics, zines, and other grassroots image–text material encouraged me to think critically about how archives necessarily frame and make visible otherwise inaccessible visual artwork—even as the materials of the major figures I study were mostly found in other collections. In the grassroots and university collections engaged across this book, which centralize documents concerning women’s sexuality and LGBTQ community, archivists have had to “take one of two approaches to dealing with the uneven power dynamics inherent in the structure of archives: either they subvert the power structures in order to re-build and reclaim them, or they build their own, more democratic or non-hierarchical alternatives.”26 Archivists’ critical perspective has been key to allowing the artwork of the women to survive in visible archives and remain relevant in the present, thanks to how archivists collect, process, and preserve the work for researchers.

Engaging the archives reveals how each woman took on multiple roles to produce and share visual artwork, including ones we often overlook or don’t spend enough time critically examining. We remember these women as artists, but they were also teachers, organizers, editors, and curators. They uplifted and influenced the artistic imagination of a larger community not only through their individual art, but also the labor they performed in these other vocations. For example, in their studies of Anzaldúa’s archives, AnaLouise Keating and Suzanne Bost discuss how her expansive collection reveals entirely new dimensions of Anzaldúa as a writer—not only through the proliferation of unpublished writings she left behind but also through the additional roles Anzaldúa took on.27 In my scholarship on Anzaldúa in this book, I examine her as a visual artist and pedagogue and analyze how she mobilized these callings to build a larger community of support from those who were already invested in her writing. Too often in our analyses, we don’t fully value the community-minded labor that many artists undertake; these women demonstrate how fundamental such labor was to how they conceived of and occupied the role of an artist.

The archives further reveal how the women themselves were invested in documenting and preserving—not only within their own individual artwork but also more broadly as they gathered the work of others as editors and curators and saved the work of others in their own collections. This multivalent archival impulse is perhaps no surprise, given that the feminist and gay and lesbian social movements of the 1970s and 1980s were broadly engaging with print media to make their experiences legible and, further, that there were groups of individuals starting grassroots archives to collect these documents and others from earlier moments of activism.28 By the end of the 1980s, institutional and university archives had started to collect LGBTQ materials into their collections to preserve them in the face of the HIV/AIDS crisis.29 That is, this book spans a historical moment during which documenting, preserving, and eventually archiving diverse voices was a part of the cultural consciousness and inflected the art that these women produced.

In 1980, as lesbian feminist poet and activist Adrienne Rich averred that “lesbian existence has been written out of history,” these women were doing their part to draw lesbian existence back into history in greater variety and scope, nesting it within a larger world of experience that valued women’s sexuality as a core part of their identity.30 As Bechdel put it in a retrospective interview, she began making comics to visually affirm her lesbian identity: “When I started drawing the strip in the early eighties, my primary motivation was that I wanted to see a cultural reflection of my life, of my humanity. An actual, visual reflection. A lot of books about lesbians were starting to appear, but there still weren’t many visual images.”31 In a monumental review of photographer Nan Goldin’s career, Hilton Als details her “passion to document,” and it is this passion, not only to document but also to represent and preserve, that defines the artwork of all these women.32

Throughout the book, each chapter analyzes how specific archives have preserved and made visible the women and their artwork. I develop a theoretically informed section for each chapter that foregrounds the archival dimensions of each woman’s artistic praxis, contextualizing her work in its time by connecting her to contemporaneous thinkers and further theorizing its continuing resonance by putting her in conversation with contemporary archival theorists. These sections build from my own experiences researching each woman’s work in one or more archival collections and considering what larger lessons could be drawn from where and how the woman’s visual work was present within the archives. I began to see, as I’ve detailed in the above paragraphs, how the women themselves were deeply invested in preservation. Through the archives, we can reconstitute a fuller story about these women’s contributions and how they laid the groundwork for future communities of sexually diverse individuals as feminist as well as gay and lesbian social movements further developed beyond the 1980s. As much as we can glimpse the women’s collective commitments through their visual artwork, the archives allow us to map out further the role and histories of those communities in the women’s lives, art, and activism.

Chapter Overview

In the following five chapters, I analyze the artwork of eight women, examining how they theorized across a range of visual print forms and showing how these forms belong together in one genealogy. Through their multifaceted image–text artwork that visualized the bodies and lives of women and queer individuals, they were making space for the representation of more diverse sexual identities within the women’s liberation and gay and lesbian movements in the late 1970s and 1980s. Every chapter investigates how the published location of the artist’s work shaped its reception and legibility within the larger feminist and gay and lesbian movements and, later, within archives. By juxtaposing how their artwork has been preserved in archives and how they themselves were invested in documenting and preserving the movement around them, each chapter contends with the paradox of how they actively created conditions for visibility while they also constantly risked invisibility in the moment and thereafter. These theoretically attuned archival sections frame close readings of the women’s work where I trace the evolution of how they wielded both image and text to theorize and represent their communities at multiple points throughout their careers. All the chapters underline how artists dealt with critique they faced for their representations of women and how they searched for more hospitable audiences and a larger community of like-minded individuals for later work.

In chapter 1, I examine how the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality (1982) catalyzed the feminist sex wars in the early 1980s when Barnard College administrators confiscated and censored the document, which served as the program for Barnard’s annual Scholar and Feminist conference. Many scholars who discuss this event focus on the women at the conference like Dorothy Allison and Gayle Rubin who were targeted by anti-porn feminists for their views on sexuality, but they pay relatively little attention to the confiscated Diary that artists Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson designed. I analyze how this trio of artists wielded collage and recontextualized images to discuss the multifaceted nature of women’s sexuality, which threatened the anti-porn protesters. The contemporaneous development of grassroots LGBTQ archives is significant for how they safeguarded controversial visual materials, providing the images that the artists themselves deployed in their collages and later preserving the Diary and other similar works from the period. In examining the Diary’s collage aesthetics and how Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson sourced images from archives and collectors, I explore how they further developed their visual activism with Caught Looking (1986), where they continued to counter the anti-porn feminists with sexually explicit imagery.

Looking back to the underground women’s comics of the mid to late 1970s, chapter 2 considers the career trajectories of Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs, whose feminist comics bildungsromane, Dynamite Damsels (1976) and The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp (1973–77), respectively, represent their protagonists’ involvement with the feminist movement alongside their developing queer sexuality. I examine how the way these comics are preserved on the margins in various archives echoes both artists’ struggle to fit their work into the feminist and underground comix movements, and how it is important to look across multiple kinds of archival collections of comics to piece together an understanding of artwork like theirs that existed at the intersection of various movements. Their comics crucially illustrate how 1970s feminism sparked sexual discovery, but critique how women of color and lesbians were excluded from full participation. Through close-reading their solo comics and then discussing their pioneering work in the Gay Comix (1980–98) series, I show how Gregory and Marrs ultimately made a new generation of women cartoonists feel welcome to explore women’s sexuality in comics form. By casting back to the 1970s, this chapter demonstrates how women worked to create venues that would support their representations and facilitate newly emerging communities of artists in the 1980s.

Chapter 3 takes up one of the best-known lesbian cartoonists, Alison Bechdel, who was inspired by early issues of Gay Comix to start cartooning in this period. Partly because she was of a younger generation than the other artists in this book, Bechdel faced less initial pushback in creating her work and was able to build off the foundations that earlier cartoonists like Marrs and Gregory had created. I close-read her little-known beginnings in the early 1980s as a comics artist, documenting how her participation in the collective of the WomaNews (1983–85) grassroots feminist periodical shaped her career. Because this research was completed fully outside of comics collections and within queer grassroots archives and university collections dedicated to sexuality and women’s history, I show how these spaces, which I collectively term queer comics archives, are necessary to trace the career and influence of queer cartoonists like Bechdel and give us ways of framing and analyzing such work. I examine how Bechdel developed an intersectional visual politics through advertisements and other art she produced in WomaNews and track how her work was in conversation with contemporaneous lesbian feminists. Through analyzing comics-adjacent visual print material, this chapter serves as a link to the following chapters that contend with a wider array of image–text media.

Chapter 4 reconceives the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa, who is well-known for her challenge of white feminism in This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and creation of new subject positions for Chicana women in Borderlands / La Frontera (1987) including her theorization of mestiza consciousness. I reclaim Anzaldúa as a visual queer theorist and show how drawing was an important part of her theorizing across her career, examining how she used drawings in her early classroom notes from the 1970s to trace ideas she would more fully explore in her celebrated texts in the 1980s. She illustrated these concepts when she gave public talks about her scholarship, and I examine how her drawings of mestiza consciousness radiated intersectionality avant la lettre and welcomed a diverse grouping of other individuals into community with her. By engaging with the visual materials she produced and kept in her own personal archives and how her practice echoes that of other Chicana women in social movements, I theorize how individual archival collections can act as bridges that preserve and connect the individual artist to a larger community.

Finally, chapter 5 analyzes the work of photographer Nan Goldin, who documented alternate queer kinships in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency throughout the 1980s, taking photos and showing them in different slideshow configurations before she published a smaller set as a book in 1986. While her photos initially circulated in conversations around sexual liberation, by the time she published her book HIV/AIDS had devastated her community, and she reconceptualized her artwork as attempting to preserve the memory of those she had lost. While the artwork of Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson was informed by the contemporary development of LGBTQ grassroots archives, Goldin’s photographic and curatorial activism is marked both by the HIV/AIDS crisis and echoes how archives started to collect and preserve this moment. I examine Goldin’s AIDS activism through her curation of Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a 1989 exhibit featuring the work of artists meditating on the AIDS crisis, and link her curatorial practice with her earlier photography. Through closing the book with the trajectory of Goldin’s work across the decade, I foreground how she and the other women in the book were able to circumvent censors who sought to curtail the visual expression of sexuality and effectively document the diverse community of individuals around them.