Making Visible the Visual

In late April 1982, just two days before an academic conference in New York City, the confiscation of a slim black handbook provided the kindling necessary to set the feminist world ablaze, igniting what became known as the feminist sex wars.1 Just over seventy pages long with a simple cover that included a visual simulation of a diary lock, Diary of a Conference on Sexuality contained both drawings and text and, crucially, was the program for Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality. The Scholar and Feminist conferences, which had been held annually at Barnard College since 1974, brought together feminist activists and scholars. The 1982 conference, coordinated by Carole S. Vance and planned by a committee of twenty-four women, aimed to “address women’s sexual pleasure, choice, and autonomy, acknowledging that sexuality is simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure, and agency” and ultimately featured eighteen workshops encompassing a wide range of perspectives on sexuality.2 Feminist activists who opposed pornography called Barnard College administrators and trustees in the week before the conference to protest. They were aiming to prevent the participation of a handful of individuals, including both those involved in planning the conference as well as those who were scheduled to speak and who represented organizations—No More Nice Girls, Samois, Lesbian Sex Mafia—that supposedly promoted pornography, sadomasochism, and pedophilia and were positioned as out of step with “a major portion of the feminist movement.”3

Rather than censor the conference presenters, Barnard College administration reacted against the Diary and its radical, punk aesthetics and sexually evocative imagery; Barnard president Ellen V. Futter worried “that the appearance of Barnard’s name in the publication implied endorsement of particular points of view—inappropriate for a college.”4 The confiscation of the Diary, which not only served as the program for the conference but also included documentation of the conference planning, did not prevent the event from proceeding. However, in the absence of the Diary, anti-porn feminists warped perceptions of the conference as they stood outside of Barnard’s gates on the day of the proceedings, handing out leaflets composed by Women Against Pornography and endorsed by Women Against Violence Against Women and New York Radical Feminists listing the women and organizations they were denouncing under a large handwritten banner that proclaimed “We Protest.”5 In a retrospective account, Vance called this handout “a masterpiece of misinformation, as the politics of feminist groups were misrepresented and women were accused of promoting pornography.”6 While the conference continued as planned, with the controversial speakers still presenting their papers, these personal attacks on Brett Harvey, Ellen Willis, Gayle Rubin, Dorothy Allison, and Patrick Califia “caus[ed] lasting pain and damage.”7

The Diary finally became available after the conference, but it was unable to make the same impact that the papers from the conference did and its important visual activism has gone largely unremarked on in the years since.8 It was only months after the conference that the 750-plus conference participants received an edited version of the Diary, which redacted the Barnard logo and other related content that would affiliate Barnard with the Scholar and the Feminist IX conference and the Diary.9 Two years after the event, conference coordinator Carole S. Vance edited Pleasure and Danger (1984), a collection that gathered together talks from the conference. Many of the texts from this anthology continue to circulate; some, like Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” have become cultural touchstones. Rubin’s essay opened the field-defining anthology The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993) and is considered foundational to queer theory, which had started to coalesce as a field around this same time following Teresa de Lauretis’s coining of the term in her 1991 essay “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities.”10 By contrast, the original Diary remains rare. Though it went through a second printing in February 1983, it was never released in a larger print run or by a more major publisher, so it is largely accessible only in archives.11

Many scholars have retrospectively referenced the feminist conflicts around the Scholar and the Feminist IX: Towards a Politics of Sexuality, colloquially remembered as the Barnard Sex Conference, as a pivotal flash point of the feminist sex wars where feminists broadly clashed over issues related to sexuality, including pornography and sadomasochism.12 Comparatively little attention is given to the graphic artists—Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson—who came together to design the Diary and how they continued their visual activism throughout the decade. Their graphic works within the Diary were central to the debate around sexual expression that occurred in the 1980s. Consequently, this event also demonstrates the key role that visual imagery played in the development of feminist discourse during this time, as the confiscation of the Diary heightened the conflict between the opposing groups of feminists. But the genealogy of this visual document and its role in theorizing women’s sexuality has not been thoroughly explored.

The story of the Diary highlights the difficulties that many feminist visual works that engaged sexuality faced in their production and circulation during the 1980s, threatening both their immediate reception and enduring legacy. Across the book, I trace similar stories of how other artists mobilized images to build a community of discourse, while they simultaneously found it difficult to make their visual feminism legible. In the following two chapters, echoes of the Diary’s difficulties can be found in how women cartoonists like Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, and Alison Bechdel struggled to find receptive venues for their feminist comics and had to create opportunities through self-publication. In the final two chapters, I demonstrate how even more immediately recognized artists, like Gloria Anzaldúa and Nan Goldin, faced critique that influenced how they shared their visual work and shaped their careers. The nuance of visual politics lies at the core of these difficulties, as visual representations of sexuality were attacked both from within and outside the feminist movement across the decade. This chapter shows how these forces united as anti-porn feminists joined with conservative lawmakers to attempt to criminalize the circulation of obscene materials in both local and national ways.

Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson further developed their visual feminist activism across the 1980s. Even before the Diary, they were invested in examining women’s sexuality together. As undergrads, they studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and, after graduating in the late 1970s, formed the collaborative artist collective Group Material with other classmates and a small coed network of other young artists.13 They fully participated in Group Material’s shows and other artistic efforts, including the feminist leaning “It’s a Gender Show!” in early 1981, but they ultimately left the group that May to commit more fully to feminist artwork and principles.14 As Alderfer opined in her departure letter, “Briefly stated; sexual politics, issues of sexual difference and preference, and feminism are met within this group with disinterest and hostility which seems irresolvable with continued participation and struggle.”15

They quickly found opportunities around them to examine sexuality within a feminist frame, including in the feminist journal Heresies, whose twelfth issue focused on issues of women’s sexuality and was cheekily titled the “Sex Issue” (Figure 1.1).16 All issues of Heresies juxtaposed feminist visual art and writing together throughout the roughly hundred-page volumes. Though Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s visual work is uncredited in Heresies #12 (1981), we can glimpse their work in a handful of unattributed collages throughout the issue, including in one roundup of archival images from the theater collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, a source that they would continue to draw on in future work.17 Together with the Diary, these publications gave the three women a platform to explore and theorize women’s sexuality as represented in, determined by, and transgressive of visual media. This trio continued to collaborate on this topic in the wake of the Barnard Sex Conference, producing the book jacket design for Vance’s Pleasure and Danger (Figure 1.1). This multimedia collage combines two personal photographs of Alderfer’s leg and Jaker’s stairwell with the other details drawn in or sourced from advertisements. Originally collaged in black and white, the work was then xeroxed in color.18 Together these visual elements and duplication process recreate the feel of a midcentury pulp novel to echo the tenor of the collection’s title.

In 1984, the same year that Pleasure and Danger was published, a number of women joined together to form the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT), which was created to challenge the feminist anti-pornography efforts to have their ideas enforced by the state. In the years since the Barnard Sex Conference, feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, together with the support of conservative politicians, had been working to institute anti-pornography ordinances across the country.19 In response, FACT took legal action, drafting and filing a legal brief that “was co-signed by the Women’s Legal Defense Fund (WLDF) and eighty individual feminists.”20 FACT also took artistic action by creating Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship (1986), a multimedia text that Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson visually designed over the course of eighteen months.21 FACT compiled Caught Looking to bring together feminist writings “on the issues of pornography and pleasure, censorship and the impulse to control, sexual politics and sexuality in women’s daily lives” framed through Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s visual design.22 The trio of artists responded to the ongoing efforts to restrict sexual expression among anti-porn feminists and conservatives by creating a densely visual book that was both more erotic and more political. While Heresies #12 and the Diary were visually suggestive, Caught Looking directly incorporated and recontextualized pornography from across history.

The use of archival materials was critical to the visual and political interventions of these vital feminist works. Both the Diary and Caught Looking are indebted to personal archives and the proclivities of collectors for their images. For example, both publications made use of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, a lesbian feminist grassroots archives inspired by conversations among members of the Gay Academic Union that launched in 1974 when Joan Nestle and Deb Edel decided to house the collection in their own apartment, where it grew exponentially until they found an independent location in the early 1990s.23 To the present day, the Lesbian Herstory Archives remains an important source on which many artists draw. For the Diary, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson also made use of the New York Public Library Picture Collection and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Photographs and Print Division. For Caught Looking, they also searched out images from “the porn shops of 42nd Street, [their] corner newsstands, back-date magazine sellers, out-of-print bookshops and . . . private dealers in New York where explicit sex-photos are for sale.”24 Looking at the intersection of archives and artistic production, specifically through the groups of women who produced the Diary and Caught Looking, shines a light on the way these artists were able to argue for a wide-ranging understanding of sexuality by recontextualizing materials from archives and collectors.25

Responding to anti-pornography feminists, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson wielded collage as a tactic to combat censorship, creating a new visual platform to express their political disagreement. Building from the Diary, where they visually augmented the conference planning notes and program, they further amplified the textual theorizations of women’s sexuality in Caught Looking by their dense use of recontextualized images from archival sources. Archives and collectors played a critical role in supporting this activism by safeguarding controversial images. In the next section, I map out how archives intersected with this artistic production. I then further interrogate how Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s collaged approach innovates a new visual form of feminist discourse while embedding familiar feminist forms—in many ways, the artists I study in the later chapters will follow this approach by responding to feminist rhetoric through visual artwork. These two sections feed into how I close-read both the Diary and Caught Looking and theorize the visually articulated feminist theory that Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson deploy through collage.

Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s continued feminist activism across the 1980s not only brought these works into the world, but also, in their work with FACT, successfully advocated against anti-pornography ordinances. They created space within the feminist movement for explicit visualities, thereby supporting other artists’ visual innovations within feminism in the years to come, including Goldin’s sexually explicit photography that I discuss in the final chapter. Ultimately, their activism fed into the sex-positive strand of the third wave in the 1990s, but their visual creations—especially the Diary—had already begun to retreat from public focus, out of print and discoverable only within the archives through which they emerged. Despite renewed attention to this period in recent years, the Diary and Caught Looking remain largely inaccessible.26

The Role of Archives and Collectors in Safeguarding Controversial Images

Grassroots or community archives preserve material from marginalized groups that might not otherwise be saved. The creation of spaces dedicated to the preservation of LGBTQ material in particular paralleled the feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1960s through 1980s.27 The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives was founded as the Western Gay Archives in 1971, the Stonewall National Museum and Archives began in 1973, the Lesbian Herstory Archives was created in 1974, the Sexual Minorities Archives began with the creation of the New Alexandria Library for Women in 1974, the Ohio Lesbian Archives was started in 1978, the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives was started as the West Coast Lesbian Collections in 1981, and the GLBT Historical Society was founded in 1985. This handful of examples from across the United States illustrates the proliferation of new archives during this period.28 While many have become more official and some have joined with university collections—like the Mazer did with the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2009 and the ONE did with the University of Southern California in 2010—all of them began as personal collections, often started in their founders’ own homes. The personal nature of these spaces persisted as they grew into grassroots archives staffed by volunteer archivists. Further, as Angela L. DiVeglia has noted, “community archives play an important role in the larger LGBT community; not only do they provide an alternative to often exclusionary archives, but they also allow a greater focus on community- and identity-building through the reclamation and self-production of history.”29 These archives were created in the absence of more official archives collecting such material, but they and the social movements affiliated with them subsequently inspired traditional spaces to take notice, such that some of the artists that I study in this book (e.g., Alison Bechdel and Gloria Anzaldúa) have their personal papers collected within long-established collections dedicated to women’s and Latin American history.

Grassroots archives like these are especially protective of controversial images because the archivists involved—including the volunteers who join later and donate their time to maintaining and growing the collection—feel a personal connection to the material. Often, materials documenting LGBTQ lives and art are under threat, so grassroots archives operate like a safe haven. Safeguarding involves archivists preserving the materials for posterity within the archives in order to actively support the discovery of these materials and their continued use in contemporary social justice movements. The space of the archives extends beyond the walls of its physical space and feeds back into various social movements. In Ann Cvetkovich’s discussion of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA), she shows how LHA has served as a source for films and documentaries, slideshows, and external exhibits.30 Grassroots archives like LHA work to make their materials more accessible not only by removing barriers to public access but also by participating in and curating exhibits and other public-facing events. The materials collected within LHA and other grassroots archives remain active as living materials rather than forgotten documents.

More than just archives, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson relied on individual collectors when locating sexually explicit images for Caught Looking. One of their major sources was Vasta Images/Books in Lower Manhattan whose images appear on most pages of Caught Looking. In thanking Joseph Vasta for the many photographs he supplied, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson noted, “We encountered imaginative erotic images and a rare compassionate sexual vision.”31 Vasta Images/Books was particularly helpful in providing a wide historical range of sources, including many of the earliest pornographic images in the chronological “100 Years of Porn” feature. Though the trove of erotic photographs from Vasta Images/Books was overwhelmingly heterosexual in nature, the role of such collectors is similar to grassroots archives like the Lesbian Herstory Archives in how they safeguard images portraying sexual diversity. Moreover, as the next chapter will discuss in further detail, individual collectors have been an important source in preserving marginalized media that later finds a place within established archives.

Because archives keep materials available for use, when you engage materials there, you cannot think of them as having been deposited there just once. Rather, you must consider how these materials circulate back and forth between archives and individuals who repurpose them for new art and thought. Attending to how multiple mediations continually shape archival materials—which Eric Ketelaar terms “recontextualisation”—supersedes the notion of provenance that prioritizes a document’s origins.32 For example, in both the Diary and Caught Looking Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson source and rework images from archives and collectors by putting them in new collaged configurations. Their artistic interventions and archival sources matter just as much as the provenance of the images. The art they use in the Diary and Caught Looking depend on the archives for visibility and vice versa, as the images’ repurposing enacts the mission of those organizations and people who deliberately preserved them. While this chapter focuses on visual documents created by sourcing images from archives, later chapters look to how archives preserve not only artworks and legacies but also the activism surrounding these works.

In maintaining materials for continual repurposing, archives disrupt the notion of a finished product just as manuscripts within archives more generally can challenge the idea of a definitive version. This disruption is a key component of these materials, as social justice movements operate on a need for futurity rather than finality. That is, movements work to continue advocating for their cause, so it is paramount that the materials also remain active. In her study of archivists who preserve third-wave feminist materials, Kate Eichhorn demonstrates how contemporary archivists themselves conceive of the archives as an active space: “For a younger generation of feminists, the archive is not necessarily either a destination or an impenetrable barrier to be breached, but rather a site and practice integral to knowledge making, cultural production, and activism.”33 By conceptualizing the archives as a space “integral to knowledge making, cultural production, and activism,” archivists facilitate how visitors to the archives can research, encounter, and reactivate the materials they come across. In short, activist archivists are essential not only in collecting and organizing the material but in facilitating its reentry into the critical discourse. How the materials from the feminist sex wars themselves are maintained underlines both their living nature and the precarity that all movement documents face. While the visual interventions of the Diary and Caught Looking were formed through the archives, their low-circulation, independently produced, and ultimately out-of-print status means that they are now largely a form of the archives themselves.34

Fittingly, then, one of the copies of the Diary within Barnard’s own archives, maintained as part of the documentation of the event, has been marked up by the college for the purposes of its eventual censorship. Barnard administration wanted to distance the institution from being affiliated with the Diary, but much of the Diary remains relatively untouched. Administrators’ biggest edit involved the page dedicated to the history of the Barnard Women’s Center (Figure 1.2). On this page of the archived version of Diary, a penciled hand annotates the page, seeking to remove the necessary affiliations from the textual description of the Center through hefty line edits. However, these focused actions are insufficient in erasing Barnard’s complicity, so the hand ultimately strikes the page entirely—a penciled X recommends the wholesale removal of the page, reinforced by striking this item from the table of contents as well.

The edited version that Barnard eventually sent out removes the description of the Barnard Women’s Center not simply by producing a blank page in its place, but by including a large gray rectangle occupying the body of the page, filling the space in a way that makes its emptiness conspicuous (Figure 1.3).35 There are other pages throughout the Diary that were intentionally left blank for conference attendees’ notes, but Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson designed them with see-through background images—hair, safety pins, matchbook, keys, condom, rose, et cetera—that float in free space and elliptically relate to the conference theme.36 Because the page is styled differently, the gray blankness noticeably hides something. Barnard’s decision to distance themselves from the Diary further demonstrates the need for independent archives and activists, as the women involved had to find other avenues for their activism around sexuality. Across the 1980s, visual artists laid claim to broadly representing sexuality, broadcasting their creations through grassroots networks affiliated with feminist as well as gay and lesbian movements rather than more official or mainstream channels.

In the coming years, major feminist works focused on sexuality were also produced by and within communities of artists and activists, particularly radical hybrid image–text documents, as I examine in subsequent chapters. The Diary and Caught Looking foreshadowed the visual aesthetics of riot grrrl zines in the 1990s, demonstrating the connection between the feminist sex wars and the pro-sexuality politics of third-wave feminism that the zines exemplify. The Diary was produced in conjunction with an academic event that heightened a growing division between opposing forces, so there was a utopian, circumspect quality to the production, while Caught Looking was an unabashedly activist document, produced through a feminist group, that contains sexually explicit imagery directly confronting the anti-pornography ordinances of the day.37 These contexts shaped Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s selection and deployment of images from archives, and just as these publications professed a wide-ranging acceptance of sexual expression, the images themselves also conveyed the importance of archives and collectors who preserved them.

Theorizing the Aesthetics of Politically Controversial Visual Forms and Visual Scholarly Discourse

By deploying collage in designing both the Diary and Caught Looking, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson created richly textured and hybrid artworks that shaped feminist discourse on sexuality through the juxtaposition of varied visual and textual forms. The stakes of sexually controversial visuality that resulted in the confiscation and censorship of the Diary by the Barnard administration in April 1982 was heightened by the time Caught Looking was published in 1986. In the intervening years, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon had been proposing local anti-pornography ordinances in a number of U.S. cities, prompting the formation of FACT and the creation of Caught Looking.38

For both publications, their hybridity helped them effectively counter the anti-pornography feminists. As Carole S. Vance described in an epilogue to Pleasure and Danger that looked back at the Barnard Sex Conference, “Illustrated by witty and evocative sexual images, the Diary contained minutes and bibliographies from planning committee discussions; personal statements from committee members; the conference concept paper; and abstracts and suggested readings from workshops. Juxtaposing text and image, the Diary invited readers to consider their inter-relationship.”39 Similarly, Ann Snitow, a member of FACT, described the hybrid composition of Caught Looking in a retrospective review: “The texts of Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship [1986] are polemics, histories, and analyses. . . . The artists turned the collection into much more: a powerful collage of words and images that is still circulating in the world, a distinguished instance of collective, political art.”40 Both of these accounts emphasize the diversity of the textual makeup of the books and how the visuals amplify the overarching argument. As writers themselves, Vance and Snitow foreground the textual variety, yet the visual elements also ranged widely—Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson meticulously detailed the visual credits across multiple pages at the back of Caught Looking.41 How they sourced their images from a variety of archival sources, as described in the above section, also contributes to the range of visual imagery in both volumes.

Through the various juxtapositions that collaging offers, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson evoked and drew strength from the diary form that was important within second-wave feminist discourse and foreshadowed the popular third-wave feminist form of zines. Moreover, their hybrid, image–text works fit in a lineage alongside notable female cartoonists like Erika Lopez and Lynda Barry who have employed collage-like aesthetics and unexpected fusions of image and text to great acclaim.42 All of these formal juxtapositions—among varieties of texts and images—determined how readers understood their feminist messages. Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s collaged approach meant that viewers could not simply determine what individual images meant; they would also need to contemplate the full constellation of images and how they existed in coordination with text. Beyond individual page compositions, readers were invited to consider the interactions of different styles of image and text present and also how the sources of the images and texts, including those gathered from archives, shaped the overall message. The collective form of collage allowed Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson to bring many sources together into conversation around women’s sexuality and illustrate the complexity of the topic, showing how variously it had been visually represented across time and contexts. Though the artists in subsequent chapters created works in other media, they also brought a collective of voices and juxtaposition of formal elements into the space of their artistic works to weigh in on women’s sexuality.

Within second-wave feminism, many writers turned to using the form of the diary in their public writing due to how it allowed women to express how the personal was political through sharing their experiences. The diary was wielded by many within the movement including well-known contemporaneous thinkers like Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Adrienne Rich. These women used the diary to facilitate a closeness between author and reader through direct address as well as to highlight the political nature of everyday, personal occurrences. Through their collaged approach, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson transformed the genre. With the Diary, they reimagined it as a public, collective form. In a short note included alongside personal messages from the other conference organizers, Alderfer commented on the use of a diary: “My secret desire was to write in a personal diary yet where could I write what I wanted but in a diary that must be made public?” (Figure 1.4).43 With this statement, Alderfer demonstrates how a public diary was necessary to reveal certain truths that had been waiting to be told. She writes in plain block letters to proclaim her position more boldly than the typewritten or cursive script entries of the other conference organizers featured on the same page. Her choice to convey her message in such a straightforward, handwritten manner underlines its personal nature, while also allowing her message to be easily readable by a larger public. That is, she translates her message to fit the form of a public diary.44 As she gestures to with her remarks, the metamorphosis of the conference program into a diary that was shared and public shapes the academic material reproduced within. Framing public, scholarly discourse through the diary genre underscored the usually private nature of sexuality and how feminists were transforming these topics by making them public and scholarly. By adopting the diary format, though, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson also underlined how personal this topic remained for all involved. While Caught Looking did not explicitly draw on the diary form, it invoked the personal in its written accounts and inclusion of pornographic images from private collectors.

The diary format is most evident in how the preliminary meeting minutes of the conference planning committee are styled as diary entries, opening these discussions to conference-goers and allowing them to learn from and think alongside these women. These nine entries at the outset span the first half of the handbook and document the initial weekly sessions from mid-September to late November 1981 during which the conference planning committee met to formulate the event.45 While these entries originated as minutes, they’re designed to look like diary entries where “Dear Diary” and that week’s date were styled in a visual font beginning each narrative entry that described that week’s meeting and thematic focus. The diary entries recorded the group’s discoveries in the present tense as their thoughts were still in the process of being formed and shared through group discussion. The present-tense tenor of this form would encourage readers to engage, particularly as they examined how the words connected to images on the page through the stylized look of “Dear Diary” and that week’s date. By intersecting with and often quite literally framing the words, the images were touched by the personal revelations and obliquely echoed them. Given that none of the images directly illustrated textual material, readers would have to dig into their associational ties to understand the interrelationship.

In these pages and throughout both volumes, the personal surfaces through the visual and forms community, as when Alderfer’s choice of handwriting highlights her personal message and invites readers to ponder her question about the possibility of diaries. The signaling of the personal through visual elements that foreground the work’s handmade nature positions both the Diary and Caught Looking as proto-zines that also are in conversation with the sex-positive politics central to zines when they became popular amidst the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s associated with third-wave feminism. This formal similarity means that the insights of zine scholars are also relevant to these creations. As mentioned in the introduction, Alison Piepmeier’s theorization of “embodied community,” which describes how zinesters form community with their readers through the zine itself, resonates with these texts. Piepmeier further expounds on this concept in her monograph Girl Zines (2009) when she writes, “The materiality of zines creates community that is embodied because it activates bodily experiences such as pleasure, affection, allegiance, and vulnerability. . . . These qualities emerge in various ways in the medium itself.”46 In this formation, it is the materiality of the zine itself as well as its handmade aesthetics that initiate “bodily experiences” among readers who become part of the community through engaging with the zine. The intimate, personal subject matter of the Diary and Caught Looking, in particular, amplifies this exchange as women reflect on their own bodies and sexualities and also are encouraged—through image and text—to think through how broader culture represents these entities. That the books are produced by many individuals also shapes the resulting community as it is not a matter of one woman connecting to another, but of a woman being recruited to join a constellation of feminists and their multifaceted and varied understandings of sexuality rather than with the limited view of the anti-pornography crew.

Both volumes operate as fusions of communities—namely, those of the varied groups that come together to create them, including Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson, who visually designed each book and engaged broader communities of archives and collectors to do so. By designing an all-encompassing visual register, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson create literal frames on each page that are positioned as looking glasses for the readers to see through. Their various layouts shape the reading experience and encourage readers to reflect on the multifaceted and complex nature of sexuality as they group individual images together to illustrate the experiences of multiple women. The kinship of the Diary and Caught Looking with these other popular feminist forms—diaries and zines—allows Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson to foreground formally the intimate nature of women’s sexuality while also facilitating a public, collective conversation. The following two sections will look more closely at how Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson deployed collage to examine the politics of women’s sexuality, and how their tactics evolved across the 1980s in response to the concurrently shifting tactics of the anti-pornography feminists.

Collaging Feminism in the Barnard Sex Conference’s Diary of a Conference on Sexuality

Despite the confiscation and editing of the Diary by the Barnard administration, its visual representations were fairly tame. Within them, though, there was the kernel for later, more explicit representations in Caught Looking with their open approach to interrogating and representing women’s sexuality and other interlocking matters. As Judith Butler described in a review of the Diary published in Gay Community News in December 1982, they had high expectations for the lascivious content of the Diary, given its censorship, “so when I opened it to find photos of women in bed with the sheets pulled up to their chins, the let down was considerable.”47 Indeed, while there are small peeks at nudity throughout the Diary with a titillating breast or butt cheek here or there, overall the images were more suggestive than erotic. Rachel Corbman summarizes the relatively innocuous visual content of the Diary in an article about the planning and aftermath of the conference: “While some of the graphics are intentionally provocative, the overall effect of the handbook seems within the limits of appropriateness for an academic publication on feminism and sexuality.”48 Yet, within these limits, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson were able to visually introduce a complex conversation on sexuality and include the diverse perspectives of the conference planning committee and workshop leaders on the page.

The Diary represents a key moment in the history of women theorizing their sexuality through images and reclaiming the power of the visual that had been so often used to objectify them. While this chapter focuses on how the visual approach of the Diary laid the groundwork for the sexually explicit visual innovations of Caught Looking, it is crucial to emphasize that these works influenced and were shaped by the visual tactics of the other artists featured in this book and are a vital touchstone in that broader political and artistic history. Indeed, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s collage aesthetics integrates comics, drawings, and photographs—the media that the other artists in this book create—throughout both the Diary and Caught Looking.

Reimagining the conference program genre through the diary genre’s ethos of meticulous recording provided a more in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the work the academic coordinator and conference planning committee did in conceptualizing the event. Typically, Barnard’s annual Scholar and Feminist conferences produced only minimal, four-page conference pamphlets that listed the schedule of the conference, so this production was exceptional.49 The Diary recreated the conference program genre by more extensively documenting the organization of the conference itself in addition to more thoroughly representing the conference schedule, devoting a page to each of the eighteen workshops planned for the afternoon of the conference. The handbook opens with the September 2, 1981, letter that Vance sent inviting scholars and activists to participate in planning the eventual conference, which outlines the potential questions the planning committee and the conference itself might tackle (Figure 1.5).50 Rather than simply reprinting the letter’s text in the booklet, the letter itself is reproduced on Barnard letterhead emerging out of an envelope, mimicking the moment when every woman first read the letter and considered participating in planning the event. In the censored version of the page reprinted here, Barnard removed their letterhead. Turning the page, the publication information and table of contents follow, and it is here that Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson announce their collaborative artistic authorship by each leaving a signed lipstick print on the publication information page, alongside a joint message to the readers, “For your pleasure / your thoughts . . . / consider sexual choices— / erotic possibilities, now / and for the future / With Love.”51 They prompt readers to embrace pleasure and amplify that message by sealing their message with a printed kiss, much as one might sign a letter to a lover. Together, these lips and Vance’s letter frame the rest of the Diary, encouraging participants to seriously weigh the matter of women’s sexuality without forgoing their embodied responses to erotic stimuli.

Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s handiwork is visible in the following pages as they reconceive the nine sets of minutes from planning meetings as collaged diary pages.52 As discussed in the previous section, these entries make evident their group discussion with many of the interspersed remarks of the conference planning committee members reflecting on how they learned to speak together about difficult and complex topics through these sessions. By making the planning process transparent through the letter and diary entries, all participants are made to feel like they can join the conversation. Following the entries in the first half of the Diary, the latter half is mostly devoted to the descriptions of the conference workshops. Also included throughout the Diary were the personal statements from every member of the planning committee, a detailed history of the Barnard Women’s Center that was ultimately censored, blank pages for notes, an address book page where attendees could collect the information of fellow conference participants, and a concept paper where the planning committee articulated a “politics of sexuality” formed through their planning meetings.

The diary entries set the aesthetic tone for the handbook. Their collage format facilitated an openness in readers’ interpretation and encouraged them to think capaciously about sexuality. Here is where we find the fairly innocuous images of women in bed that Butler gestured to in their review, which first appear with the September 22 and October 6 entries (Figure 1.6).53 In these early meetings, the women are still discussing sexuality broadly, responding to Vance’s engagement with the topic and tracing out their own. In both of these entries, we see photographs of women alone and in small groups peeking their faces out from under the bed covers in the bottom outer corners of each page. To add another layer of visual complexity, these images are presented as if they are the hidden content under each page as, above each image, we see an illustration of a rolled-up corner. This design suggests that each meeting allows the participants to fold back the corners and see these women and their sexual experiences just as the women themselves are peeling back the covers to reveal themselves to the photographer. As the first entry of the Diary on September 16 only showed a hand beginning to write on a blank page, these images set the tone for the representation of women throughout the handbook.

The entries that follow don’t always show women in bed, but the next one that does, November 10, illustrates how the conference committee had broadened their conversation to consider the multivalent ways in which women engage sexuality in their lives.54 This entry includes a photo-collage comic that unfolds in two panels apiece across the top of three pages (Figure 1.7). During that meeting, the women discussed how Black and white feminists engaged sexuality differently, and the comic also follows that theme and represents their shared conversation. It depicts a Black and white woman, both hidden under a bed, who encounter each other and work through their internal biases in order to emerge out from under the bed and talk together about sexuality.

The women and bed are inked in a cartoon style, while photographs in the space above the bed illustrate the mental images that each woman works through in order to engage the other.55 The photographs depict how race has separated the women, while the internal dialogue of each woman emphasizes how sexuality has kept them from being in solidarity with each other. The photographs transition from the historical to the contemporary, emphasizing how the legacy of the enslavement of Black people in America shapes their encounter. The first photograph shows the white children of a slaveholding family who are accompanied by their enslaved caretakers; this image is contrasted with the white and Black woman tentatively peeking their heads out from under the bed and sighting the other woman. The second panel contrasts images of Black and white suffragettes, including an iconic image of Sojourner Truth, while the third panel features a photo from the 1968 sanitation workers strike in Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In these panels, each woman wonders to herself how the other woman is perceiving her on the basis of racial sexual stereotypes. Starting with the civil rights photograph, which is split in half, the women grow bolder and begin to emerge out from under the bed, as the photographs continue to tilt and recede, such that they’re almost imperceptible in the fifth panel and nonexistent in the sixth. Across these panels, the women start to directly speak with each other, acknowledging that they want to talk about sex. In the sixth and final panel, as the two women sit on the edge of the bed and ask, “Ready?” in unison, a surprising number of other Black and white women spring out from under the same bed. Just as the meeting described in the entry was a starting point to having a discussion about sexuality and race, so, too, does this “Ready?” signify the start of a conversation that would continue at the conference itself.

Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson shaped the visual language of the Diary not only by sourcing their images from a wide variety of archives, including the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Photographs and Print Division, but by also calling on the workshop facilitators to contribute images to introduce their workshops. As the table of contents entry for the workshops states, “Each workshop leader was asked to provide a description of her workshop, a postcard illustration with a brief description, and bibliographic suggestions for future reading on her topic.”56 Due to the fact that the topics of the workshops varied widely, so did the visuals. The shared postcard format for the workshops links them together and addresses potential attendees as friends receiving personal messages that encapsulate the workshop topic in more accessible language. Just like the letter at the outset, the postcards position each session as a friendly exchange awaiting a response. Both the postcards and the personal messages from the members of the planning committee situate each woman’s connection to the conference and encourage the attendees to do the same. The address book that Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson included on the back inside cover would have—if the Diary had been distributed at the conference—further facilitated these personal links by giving attendees a space where they could record the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of new connections so that they could continue to be in dialogue following the event.57 These gestures highlight and seek to broaden the community represented with this handbook.

Even the visuals that Dorothy Allison and Gayle Rubin—two of the women that the anti-pornography feminists protested—provided for their workshops were suggestive but not explicit. For her “Politically Correct, Politically Incorrect Sexuality” workshop that she organized with Muriel Dimen, Mirtha N. Quintanales, and Joan Nestle, Allison contributed a collaged postcard that showed an aghast Dorothy Gale standing in the middle of a gay bar as leather-clad men embrace and play pool around her (Figure 1.8). A couple of the men look back at her with wondering glances. Her presence in this space slyly nods to the fact that gay men are euphemistically known as friends of Dorothy. The preprinted message on the flipside of this cheeky postcard reads, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” reinterpreting one of her famous lines from The Wizard of Oz (1939) for this new context. With a flourish of cursive script, Allison signs her name, Dorothy, signaling her solidarity with this subculture of gay men as well.

Rubin’s postcard for her “Concepts for a Radical Politics of Sex” workshop also depicts an image of leather-clad gay men. Here, in a cartoon image from the famed Tom of Finland, whose drawings had been popular among gay men since the 1950s, a naked man lying suggestively on a tiled floor looks out at the viewer as he’s lovingly trampled by and delights in a series of leather boots belonging to at least four other individuals that surround him. On the flipside of the postcard, Rubin typed up a quotation from Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978) and printed a stamp that features the phrase “thought crimes,” which was coined by George Orwell in his dystopic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) that depicts a society so oppressed by the ruling class that individuals are surveilled and punished for even an “incorrect” thought. Both of their postcards subtly nod to the leather subculture that often went hand in hand with sadomasochistic sexual practices that the anti-pornography feminists protested as deviant when they targeted both Rubin and Allison and their respective associations with the Samois and Lesbian Sex Mafia organizations. Their perspectives, conveyed through curated image and text, joined alongside a wide range of others at the conference that aimed, in Vance’s words, “to allow more information about the diversity of women’s experiences to emerge.”58

As a whole, the Diary presents a vision for women’s sexuality where the images themselves play an important role, setting the stage not only for Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s later work with Caught Looking, but also for the work of the other artists discussed in this book. Especially through their repurposing of photographs, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson underline how women and their sexuality have been represented and emphasize the need for a different approach, which subsequent artists provide. In their more explicit work in Caught Looking, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson show how to reclaim and understand these images as empowering, outlining a visual theorization of women’s sexuality that embraced rather than censored erotic representations of women’s bodies.

Evolving Explicit Collage Aesthetics in Caught Looking

First published in 1986, Caught Looking was a groundbreaking work that brought together essays and innovative, sexually explicit visual material in a direct attempt to fight against the anti-porn feminist movement that had worked to create restrictive ordinances in the years since their protests of the Barnard Sex Conference. Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson visually designed this volume as part of the activist FACT organization, which was formed in 1984 to advocate against the anti-pornography legislation championed by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon. Though a number of the women involved with FACT and those who contributed essays to Caught Looking were academics, Caught Looking was an activist rather than academic project, which meant that Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson could deliver on the erotic content hinted at in the Diary, evolving explicit collage aesthetics to do so. Their reclamation of sexual imagery echoed the actions of feminist creators of erotica and pornography whose artwork they also included in the collection alongside more patriarchal sources.

The overall aesthetic project of Caught Looking counters the slideshows that anti-pornography groups across the nation put on in the late 1970s and 1980s to “raise public consciousness and to let audiences see for themselves the kind of offensive and abusive media images that the organizations denounced.”59 Groups like the San Francisco–based Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media started in 1976 and the New York City–based Women Against Pornography, which was established in 1979 and was the main group behind the Barnard Sex Conference protest, frequently hosted slideshows that presented hard- and softcore pornography paired with text to interested groups of women.60 These organizations also used a script they read in conjunction with the slideshow, which was very deliberate in interpreting all of the images as harmful.61 Some of the groups also hosted walking tours, presenting women with a guided experience of their local red-light districts and exposing them to sex shops and peep shows.62

While Caught Looking drew on some of the same images as these groups did, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson did extensive research and broadened the scope of material included. Rather than dictating singular analyses of given images as the slideshows demanded, the artists allowed readers to interpret the images for themselves. Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson also paired images with text in order to make meaning of pornographic images, but their deployment of images allowed readers more freedom in decoding them. The fact that the images were included in a series of feminist essays did prompt readers to understand them as part of a feminist project, but just how to negotiate them was left open. Indeed, as theater scholar Elinor Fuchs, who admitted her “ambivalence” toward the feminist sex wars in a review of Caught Looking, asserted, “At a programmatic level, some feminists have been working to break down barriers between the two populations of women [the ‘good girl’ and the ‘bad girl’] and their representations. Caught Looking performs the merger by making readers look at ‘dirty’ pictures in order to read feminist texts (or encounter feminist texts in order to gaze at dirty pictures).”63 While Fuchs posited that “Caught Looking performs [a] merger” of disparate contexts, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson utilized collage to challenge the notion that the “‘dirty’ pictures” were separate from the “feminist texts.” By organizing images together in sets—so that there were multiple on the page—Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson encouraged the reader to move away from ascribing individual meaning to images, the very tactic the anti-pornography groups used in their scripted, didactic slideshows. Moreover, in addition to the images they included with articles, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson also reproduced nine sets of images as visual collages devoid of textual meaning aside from short descriptive titles given to them in the table of contents: “power,” “powder puff,” “comfort,” “sex cafe & tender,” “gaze,” “spread,” “fuck,” “liquid,” and “fantasy outfits.” Letting the images collectively speak for themselves communicates Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s feminist stance against censorship, but it also echoes the work of the other artists discussed across this book as they theorized visually through sequences and accumulations of images.

Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson further complicated Fuchs’s binary between the “‘dirty’ pictures” and the “feminist texts” by including feminist erotica and pornography alongside traditional pornographic images. Combining all the disparate sources together further troubled the binary by not making a judgment call on some images as correct and others as fraught. Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson incorporated images by women creators including Lynda Barry, Lizzie Borden, Louise Bourgeois, Betty Dodson, Nan Goldin, Morgan Gwenwald, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, and Anita Steckel. In addition, they featured the photography of Honey Lee Cottrell and Annie Sprinkle multiple times throughout the collection, acknowledging these artists’ depth of commitment to understanding explicit portrayals of a wide range of sexual practices as part of the feminist project. Both artists’ works were published regularly in the lesbian erotica magazine On Our Backs, founded in 1984. By offering up images from a wide range of sources and cultural locations—from museum walls to mail-delivered erotica—Caught Looking welcomed readers by creating an associational web that affirmed these images and held them all on an equal plane.

The book includes two introductions: one from three of the editors—Kate Ellis, Barbara O’Dair, and Abby Tallmer—and one from the designers—Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson.64 Rather than having one introduction follow the other, they instead interleave these texts together, mirroring the rest of the collection. The designers’ statement occupies one page whereas the introduction by the editors unfolds over three pages. Sets of images face each of the subsequent pages of the editors’ introduction, foregrounding how the designers will speak throughout the rest of the volume through complex visual–textual layouts. These introductory texts center the primacy of images, with Ellis, O’Dair, and Tallmer averring, “In creating this book, we found it necessary to address the lack of exposure most of us have had to sexually explicit materials, and to turn to the materials themselves for a beginning definition.”65 This “turn to the materials” is a turn to the visual that is key here and throughout the volume; letting the images not only define themselves but also set the definitions allows readers to understand sexuality in a more nuanced and fluid way. Moreover, through this turning, the editors encourage the readers to do their own by turning each page and formulating their own definitions from this constellation of images.

Both the editors and designers not only see Caught Looking as an argument in support of explicit material but as an introduction to it, as well, which shapes Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s selection of images. In their designers’ statement, they transform this process of “turn[ing] to the materials,” positing, “In making our final selection, we considered that for some this book would be an initiation into the world of sexually explicit images. We chose images that are both strong and appealing. We also included images that would impart a history of the envisioning of sex. And, ultimately, like all consumers of pornography, we chose those images we found erotically powerful, the pictures that turned us on.”66 When selecting images, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson prioritize ones that encourage the readers to turn yet again—not only to turn the pages of the book, but to turn back to their own bodies and be “turned . . . on” by them. This nesting set of turns outlines a series of readerly actions to be set in motion by Caught Looking—with an attention to the body at the center of both the images and the readers’ actions. These turns seek to position the readers and the representations in parallel pleasure. Just as Ellis, O’Dair, and Tallmer suggest that readers should turn to the materials to understand better both sexual pleasure and its representations, so do Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson recommend that readers turn to their own bodies to solidify that understanding by indulging themselves in sexual satisfaction. Where the anti-pornography slideshows wanted the audience to turn away with disgust, this collection stimulated a turning toward to understand matters from the inside. Caught Looking thus argues for a horizontal, collective self-knowledge rather than the hierarchical, authoritative lessons of the slideshows, and it is this same ethos that undergirds the visual production of the artists in subsequent chapters.

Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s arrangement of images within the volume amplifies that collective pleasure. They often include multiple renderings of any one action on a single page, and the multiplication of the action there and across the collection suggests a diversity of approaches to pleasure. For example, one of the imagistic arrays of photos titled “Pictures (Spread)” illustrates six different methods of vaginally focused foreplay—from self-love to digital and oral penetration to face-sitting.67 To wit, readers encounter a buffet rather than a set menu of sexual pleasure. Across Caught Looking, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson amplify that buffet by including a temporal range of historic and contemporary pornography, foregrounded in their “100 Years of Porn” feature where they include an image in the “low right corner of each right page” that tracks the development of porn from the 1890s “in an approximate chronology to the present.”68 These images intertwine with the layouts that Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson design for each essay.

Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson also arrange sets of images into sequences within page spreads. The images accompanying Lisa Duggan’s essay “Censorship in the Name of Feminism” are arranged in a sort of faux sequencing that encourages the reader to consider a whole cornucopia of sexual scenarios (Figure 1.9). While the photos on the first spread are largely gathered from contemporary feminist sources including Sprinkle’s photography and Borden’s filmic oeuvre, the images on the following pages come from geographically and temporally disparate sources. Across eight pages, these images operate as snapshots into twenty-one worlds of individual experience. The images grow marginally in size with each sequence, bringing us closer to these worlds but never close enough to understand the entirety of the moments captured. Juxtaposed with these images are those in the bottom right-hand corner of each page spread that form part of the “100 Years of Porn” feature. The contribution to this feature on the fourth page of Duggan’s essay takes us to four images from a circa 1950s photo shoot of a scantily clad man showing off his muscles in a desolate outdoor setting.69 These photographs, like those sequenced throughout Duggan’s piece, do not show a progression of action. Together, these orderless series embody a refusal to prescribe that pleasure progress in one way or another—readers are encouraged to imagine their own entry and exit points to sexual gratification.

In their essays, many of the writers directly discuss the arguments of the anti-pornography activists; the accompanying collages refract the limited views into a more multifaceted prism of experience. In Paula Webster’s essay “Pornography and Pleasure” she recounts attending one of the Women Against Pornography’s slideshows and then joining the group in a walking tour of the seedy Times Square pornographic district thereafter. When originally published in Heresies #12 (1981) as part of its “Sex Issue,” erotic feminist comics were included alongside the piece.70 When Webster’s essay was reprinted in Caught Looking, Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson transported the reader to Forty-Second Street. More so than elsewhere in the volume, the essay is surrounded by images, echoing Webster’s own experience that she recounts. Yet, even amid neon signs offering up “live sex acts,” “fantasy,” “sex play,” and “live” “nude” “adult” “girls” displayed on each of the essay’s pages, Webster finds “important messages for women” in pornography and admits that “it is true that this depiction is created by men, but perhaps it can encourage us to think of what our own images and imaginings might be.”71 A handful of the images are Sprinkle’s “own [feminist] images and imaginings” of this seedy sexual milieu, but Webster’s words juxtaposed with Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s collage also cast the rest of the images in a new light as not simply replicating the author’s experiences of exploring Times Square with Women Against Pornography but, rather, envisioning how women can reclaim such myriad images for their own pleasure.

On the two middle pages of the essay, the most heavily imagistic spread demonstrates this reimagining through photographs that link women with wild animals (Figure 1.10).72 They aim to find new life in this well-worn cultural pairing by reproducing photographs that date from the 1940s and 1950s when this pairing was used in many B horror films like Cat People (1942), The Curse of the Cat People (1944), Jungle Woman (1944), and The Cat Creeps (1946), in which a femme fatale threatened horrific violence whenever she transformed into a wild animal.73 This small collection of images underline how pervasive this trope is and how subtle it can be, by showing women with wild animals alongside those who are clothed in or photographed against animal print. Important within such a constellation of images, this relationship is deployed only in ways that facilitate ecstasy—two of the women pictured have their heads tilted back in a likely moan. These photos that imply an unbridled female sexuality through this association with wild animals are but one pornographic trope that Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson reclaim.

In reimagining images through collective collage and synthesizing materials from different times, the designers highlight persistent themes within pornography as they shift or reclaim these tropes and feature contemporary feminist pornography that also does this work. The essays participate in creating that shifting ground by documenting and advocating against the anti-pornography activists. As Caught Looking went into production, anti-pornography efforts began to be stymied on a national level when the Supreme Court affirmed the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana’s decision that the Indianapolis ordinance was unconstitutional in American Booksellers Association, Inc. v. Hudnut.74 Yet, unlike the Diary, Caught Looking transcended its immediate moment in part because of how its creators understood it “as a sourcebook from which to derive new questions regarding these topics.”75 Though it documented the current debate about the role of sexually explicit images, it also acted “as a guide for further activism.”76 The women of FACT wanted readers to return to the text again and again rather than understanding it as a snapshot of a particular time, and its hybrid nature facilitates that action. The many juxtapositions on any single page position the volume as speaking across time.

Three further reprintings of the book—in 1988, 1992, and 1995—attest to the collection’s enduring relevance as the feminist sex wars itself waned in the face of third-wave feminism.77 In each of these editions, new prefatory remarks on the inside of the front cover engage with high-profile court cases involving women’s sexuality to demonstrate its continued need. The second edition marked the collapsing of the anti-pornography movement through the repeal of the ordinances and looked ahead:

With the 1986 Supreme Court decision invalidating the Indianapolis antipornography ordinance, the momentum behind such ordinances dissipated. The effort to defeat one antipornography ordinance was over; the larger struggle to change the overwhelmingly sexist environment in which we all live continues. For us, sexual issues remain fundamental to feminist debate and sexual liberation implicit in women’s liberation. We offer this second edition of Caught Looking as both a document of a heady time and a fluid dialogue about women and sex.78

With these words, FACT claimed victory while articulating how these issues and images remained active rather than resolved. With the third edition in the early nineties, the editors identified three recent legal cases in which women spoke out publicly about sexual harassment and assault:

Increasingly, issues of women’s freedom and credibility in the realm of sexuality are reshaping our institutions and our relationships. . . . The testimony of Anita Hill in the Thomas confirmation process, Patricia Bowman in the William Kennedy Smith trial, and Desiree Washington in the Mike Tyson trial aroused virulent attack as well as impassioned defense. They also brought into sharp focus the complex web of race and class that underlies any discussion of sexuality in our culture.79

This April 1992 preface points to how these cases outlined a “complex web of race and class.” A full ten years after the events of the Barnard Sex Conference, these cases highlight the enduring nature of the issues that the Diary raised and that Caught Looking further explored. Following this passage, the editors espouse “hope” that “this collection will contribute to a dialogue about sexuality and its representation.” However, that hope is largely unrealized, as demonstrated by the treatment of Hill, Bowman, and Washington and the results of their testimony in each of the cited cases—not to mention the treatment that even more contemporary women have received in similar cases. Despite Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson’s artistic activism across the 1980s, sexuality and its representations remained a contentious debate. Despite its continuing relevance, Caught Looking went out of print following its fourth edition in 1995.

Archives and Afterlives: Creating Space in the Feminist Movement for Explicit Visualities

In the late 1990s and subsequent decades, both the Diary and Caught Looking faded from recognition, while the issues that animated them remain unresolved. In the last decade and a half, the Barnard Sex Conference’s importance within the feminist sex wars has come under renewed attention, including in special issues of journals like the Communication Review’s 2008 “Commemorating the Barnard Conference,” GLQ’s 2011 “Rethinking Sex,” and the 2016 “Pleasure and Danger: Sexual Freedom and Feminism in the Twenty-First Century” installment of Signs.80 In reviewing the Barnard Sex Conference in these accounts, scholars mainly focus on the textual rhetoric, only briefly mentioning the image–text productions. Not only is the centrality of the Diary to this historical fracture overlooked, but the significance of the Diary’s visual legacy is also cast aside.

The GLQ issue did pay some attention to the Diary by reprinting various sections through “The GLQ Archive” feature where the journal makes available “previously unpublished or unavailable primary materials that may serve as sources for future work in lesbian and gay studies.”81 This issue focused on the feminist sex wars and the Barnard Sex Conference through Rubin’s famed “Thinking Sex” essay, illustrating how, thirty years after the fact, Rubin’s supposedly antifeminist ideas were integral for queer discourse. This contemporary interest in Rubin’s views was further underlined by the release of Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader (2011) by Duke University Press that same year. It took only a little over ten years for Rubin’s thought to be valued as important and recast as foundational for the emerging discourse of queer theory. As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Rubin’s import is further acknowledged through the inclusion of “Thinking Sex” in the groundbreaking Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.82

GLQ focused on the conference through Rubin’s participation as a workshop facilitator, so the editors reproduced mainly the latter pages of the Diary concerning the events of the conference itself. Across the twenty-eight pages of the seventy-plus-page Diary reproduced within GLQ, they printed ten of the eighteen pages devoted to conference sessions as well as the two pages detailing the opening and closing sessions, but only two of the nine entries documenting conference planning. The two diary entries reproduced in GLQ are the October 20 entry discussing issues of S–M and taboo sexualities and the November 10 entry focusing on the role of race within feminism and sexuality.83 These choices echo those foci of the conference that would receive attention within the feminist movement across the 1980s and that the artists I study across this book engage in their visual theorizing. While these entries are representative of the other entries, we miss how Alderfer, Jaker, and Nelson captured the wide range of theoretical conversations that animated the conference planners through the sheer visual variety that all nine diary entries provided in their succession of different layouts, fonts, and visual media. Despite the limitations of this reproduction, the issue indicated that the Diary would soon be fully digitized and housed at a dedicated website, but that promise never materialized.84

Where archives once served as the source material for the Diary and Caught Looking, they now serve as its primary residence. This is true even more so for the Diary, as it was produced for the roughly 750 conference attendees and was never released by a larger publisher in a format that would earn it shelf space in a library collection.85 Though also rare and currently out of print, the multiple editions of Caught Looking with print runs of up to five thousand foreground its aim to reach communities beyond those initially imagined. While their liminal existence stifles the ability of either book to stir contemporary readers to consider the complexity of women’s sexuality and its representations through engaging with and thus viscerally responding to the images that first instigated debate, women have continued to examine their own sexuality through graphic depictions. But it is critical that we pay attention to these earlier, obscured creations, in order to see how foundational these materials were to feminist debate and how they still resonate and reverberate, despite their peripheral status in mainstream culture.

Looking anew at image–text creations from this era is essential for allowing us to begin to trace a genealogy of representations of women’s sexuality that started with these works, and that continued throughout the 1980s in the work of other important feminist artists. The following chapters track this history in more detail. The next chapter steps back in time to the late 1970s to examine the feminist underground comics of Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. They were using the visual format to critique the feminist movement’s limitations while also wielding it to create a more capacious feminist community that would embrace women of color and lesbians. At first, they struggled to have their work accepted within the feminist movement until they started publishing in Gay Comix, a series started in 1980 that allowed them to inspire and build a larger community of women cartoonists. Like this chapter, this second chapter and the ones that follow trace the trajectory of an artist’s career and how they ultimately figured out how to grow supportive communities.