Abstract/Details

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, queer theory, & visual culture

Galvan, Margaret.   City University of New York ProQuest Dissertations Publishing,  2016. 10105422.

Abstract (summary)

Archiving the '80s: Feminism, Queer Theory, & Visual Culture locates a shared genealogy of feminism and queer theory in the visual culture of 1980s American feminism. Gathering primary sources from grant-funded research in a dozen archives, I analyze an array of image-text media of women, ranging from well known creators like Gloria Anzaldúa, Alison Bechdel, and Nan Goldin, to little known ones like Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. In each chapter, I examine how each woman develops movement politics in her visual production, and I study the reception of their works in their communities of influence. Through studying hybrid visual rather than merely literary output, I explore the overlooked role of visual culture in feminist and LGBT social justice movements. In the first chapter, I review the transition period from the 1970s through the comics work of Roberta Gregory and Lee Marrs. Their early comics demonstrate the limitations of 1970s feminism, and I analyze how they develop their critiques in the 1980s in newly created comics series like Gay Comix (1980–1998). In the second chapter, I reconfigure the legacy of cartoonist Alison Bechdel as a grassroots activist through analyzing her participation as production coordinator of multiple grassroots periodicals across the 1980s. The third chapter resituates Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa as a visual thinker and examines how she fuses race and sexuality in drawings that she would use to illustrate her own talks. I consider the importance of visual discourse to women of color feminism by evaluating the changing visual material in each version of her famed anthology, This Bridge Called My Back (1981, 1983, 2002, 2015). In the fourth chapter, I scrutinize the evolving politics of photographer Nan Goldin in her well known The Ballad of Sexual Dependency slideshow and in her little-discussed curation of the controversial AIDS exhibit, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing (1989). Through these artists’ visual production, I argue that the visual offers a more capacious form of feminism that embraces diversity, especially around issues of sexuality.

Indexing (details)


Subject
Art history;
Womens studies;
American literature;
LGBTQ studies
Classification
0377: Art history
0453: Womens studies
0492: LGBTQ studies
0591: American literature
Identifier / keyword
Language, literature and linguistics; Social sciences; Communication and the arts; 1980s; Activism; Anzaldua, Gloria; Archives; Bechdel, Alison; Comics; Goldin, Nan; Gregory, Roberta; Lesbians; Marrs, Lee; Visual culture
Title
Archiving the '80s: Feminism, queer theory, & visual culture
Author
Galvan, Margaret
Number of pages
257
Degree date
2016
School code
0046
Source
DAI-A 77/09(E), Dissertation Abstracts International
Place of publication
Ann Arbor
Country of publication
United States
ISBN
978-1-339-68888-6
Advisor
Miller, Nancy K.
Committee member
Chuh, Kandice; Chute, Hillary; Gerstner, David
University/institution
City University of New York
Department
English
University location
United States -- New York
Degree
Ph.D.
Source type
Dissertation or Thesis
Language
English
Document type
Dissertation/Thesis
Dissertation/thesis number
10105422
ProQuest document ID
1787554674
Copyright
Database copyright ProQuest LLC; ProQuest does not claim copyright in the individual underlying works.
Document URL
https://www.proquest.com/docview/1787554674