This event takes place in person at Charis and on crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Click here to register to attend virtually. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event.
Charis welcomes Margaret Galvan in conversation with Julie Kubala for a discussion of In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities. This event is co-sponsored by the Gay Johnson McDougall Center for Global Diversity and Inclusion. Part of the Division of Equity and Inclusion at Agnes Scott College, the Gay Johnson McDougall Center for Global Diversity and Inclusion is committed to fostering a community that celebrates and honors the intersections of identity.
In 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars. In Visible Archives documents the community networks that produced this resonant artifact and others, analyzing how visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities.
Margaret Galvan explores a number of feminist and cultural touchstones—the feminist sex wars, the HIV/AIDS crisis, the women in print movement, and countercultural grassroots periodical networks—and examines how visual culture interacts with these pivotal moments. She goes deep into the records to bring together a decade’s worth of research in grassroots and university archives that include comics, collages, photographs, drawings, and other image-text media produced by women, including Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, Marybeth Nelson, Roberta Gregory, Lee Marrs, Alison Bechdel, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Nan Goldin.
The art highlighted in In Visible Archives demonstrates how women represented their bodies and sexualities on their own terms and created visibility for new, diverse identities, thus serving as blueprints for future activism and advocacy—work that is urgent now more than ever as LGBTQ+ and women’s rights face challenges and restrictions across the nation.
Margaret Galvan is Assistant Professor of Visual Rhetoric in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her archivally informed research examines how visual culture operates within social movements and includes a first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, forthcoming this fall with University of Minnesota Press. In 2021-2022, she was in residence at the Stanford Humanities Center as the Distinguished Junior External Fellow researching a second book about how communities of LGBTQ cartoonists innovated comics through grassroots formats. Her publications on comics in social movements can be found in journals like American Literature, Archive Journal, Australian Feminist Studies, iNKS, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and WSQ. See margaretgalvan.orgfor more information.
Julie Kubala has been involved in the lesbian/queer community in Atlanta for the past 30-something years. She also teaches in the Institiute for Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University, where her classes focus on queer theory, LGBT studies, and activism.
This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Charis Circle's mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage
In-person event guidelines:
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All attendees must wear a face mask at all times inside the building
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We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.
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This event will be live-streamed via crowdcast. Click here to register to attend virtually.
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As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.
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If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request specific accessibility accommodations, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304
If you would like to watch the virtual event with computer-generated captions, please watch in Google Chrome and enable captions. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don't hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org. We are actively learning the best practices for this technology and we welcome your feedback as we continue to connect across distances.
By attending our event you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to info@chariscircle.org immediately.
Analyzing how 1980s visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities
In 1982, the protests of antiporn feminists sparked the censorship of the Diary of a Conference on Sexuality, a radical and sexually evocative image-text volume whose silencing became a symbol for the irresolvable feminist sex wars.