Epilogue

Whenever Gloria Anzaldúa gave a public talk illustrated by her drawings or Nan Goldin shared her slideshow of photographs in a neighborhood bar or Alison Bechdel self-syndicated her comic in someone’s local newspaper, innumerable people were influenced in ways that we cannot fully trace. The works of all the artists featured in this book continue to reverberate in the present moment and touch contemporary discourses around identity and sexual expression, though they remain unevenly remembered outside the archives. The archives and afterlives sections across this book trace some of these connections to the present, but each artist’s embrace of communal modes of creation and distribution defies neat and tidy lines of transmission.

All the women in this book contributed to feminist and queer discourse in underacknowledged ways and laid the foundation for later critical work—whether that be through the evolution of new visual styles or through the development of new theory inspired by their imagistic interventions. Artistically, their focus on fluid representations of sexuality that embraced the multivalence of identity and foregrounded intersectional portrayals was echoed in the third and subsequent waves of feminism, including in the DIY self-published zines that young girls produced in connection to the riot grrrl movement in the early 1990s. Their once avant-garde approaches are now often subsumed into the mainstream. For instance, art critic Craig Hubert sees “an appropriation of [Goldin’s] work by the current snapshot-obsessed generation” who share their photos on social media platforms like Instagram.1 The ideas and critiques of these artists remain relevant today.

Much of the artwork discussed in this book remains difficult to access, filed away in visible archives and on the edges of our collective memory. Physical archives rather than the bookstore, library, or internet were how I first encountered most of these materials during grant-funded research trips over the course of a decade.2 Much of the research in this book relies on archival collections processed in the past two decades. In the last ten years, there has been a resurgence of interest in prominent lesbian feminists from the 1980s, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Gayle Rubin, and Barbara Smith, as newly released anthologies of their writing have made their theoretical contributions available again.3 At the same time, increasing numbers of scholars have been deftly recovering the print histories of feminist and LGBTQ activism across the 1970s and 1980s.4 This book contributes to this body of work by centralizing the importance of visuality to these movements, which has received relatively little attention.

The rise of digitization has begun to transform access as more and more feminist as well as gay and lesbian activist sources have been put online in proprietary, open-access, and grassroots spaces.5 Some of the very work I cite in this book can now be found online and sometimes in multiple repositories, like Bechdel’s early comics that can be located in digitized copies of WomaNews on Reveal Digital’s open-access Independent Voices project and in Gale’s proprietary Archives of Sexuality and Gender. If you looked for her comics as they began to appear in other grassroots periodicals, the field of relevant digital archives widens even further. However, just because something is preserved in visible archives, whether physical or digital, does not mean that it has been safeguarded against being forgotten. Digitization doesn’t always go far enough to contextualize artwork within its time or communities, and visual materials are not always easy to find in digital archives, especially in collections that rely on optical character recognition technologies that make searchable the embedded text but none of the images. Yes, Bechdel’s early comics are online, but you would need to know how and where to look for them, and the work of countless lesser-known artists remains further submerged, despite digitization.

We need to consider how we can bring the vibrant worlds of these artists and their surrounding communities to public knowledge so that they can influence future generations. As a quick illustration of this point, I always ask: Who can’t you google? Who isn’t on Wikipedia? For example, despite the impact of their sex-positive collages on the feminist sex wars, Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson are virtually invisible online. None of these artists is easy to google and none of them have a Wikipedia page, nor are they mentioned on the Wikipedia pages dedicated to the 1982 Barnard Sex Conference for which they designed the Diary (1982) or the collaborative artist collective they helped form in the late 1970s, Group Material.

To counter such gaps, in comics courses I’ve taught I’ve had students recover the legacy of cartoonists underrepresented on Wikipedia. In recent iterations of this project, I had students focus on LGBTQ cartoonists from the 1980s and 1990s, most of whom had participated in the long-running Gay Comix (1980–98) series where Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs had pioneered representations of queer women. Across two semesters of this project, students had improved twenty-nine biographies and created twenty-one new entries. Even so, roughly half of the hundred-plus artists who participated in the Gay Comix series still do not have biographies on Wikipedia, so the work continues.6

More than one specific approach to recovery, however, it is my hope that the archival sections present in each chapter of this book, built from the experiences of researching these women across many archives and engaging relevant discourses around archives, will provide useful methods and context for thinking through how to approach research and how to engage the infrastructure of archives in order to recover the memory not only of individual artists but also of the larger milieux that supported them. Such support does not end with the creation of the artwork, but continues as these works find residence in the archives. After all, what I’ve encountered in the archives is there because of communities of individuals who valued, saved, and deposited it and the archivists who welcomed, cataloged, and made it accessible. As the critical conversations around archives across this book underline, the lives of women, people of color, and queer folks have historically been seen as disposable and unworthy of preservation, so this book is indebted to the creation of all those grassroots archives that welcomed and upheld difference and to all the folks who went to work within more established archives and began to imagine who and what to collect differently. Thank you.