Wars
In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s – review
Margaret Galvan‘s In Visible Archives explores the political power of archival material in shaping feminist and queer futures. Applying archival studies and comics scholarship to work from the 1980s by visual artists including Alison Bechdel and Nan Goldin, Galvan’s timely book underscores the importance of visibility in ongoing activism and community-building, writes Max Shirley.
Archive fever has hit the UK. Tate Britain’s exhibition, Women in Revolt! – which opened in late 2023 and will soon be relocated to Scotland, followed by Manchester – has brought second-wave feminist posters, pamphlets and other radical paraphilia out of the storeroom and into public view. In displays like this, archival material – some of which has gone unseen for over 40 years – is imbued with new life as visitors, activists, and community groups imagine how these items can be (re)used in the ongoing fight for a more equitable future.
Galvan examines how several American visual artists, including the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and photographer Nan Goldin, incorporate activism in their work and create a sense of collectivity.
The political and transformative potential of feminist and queer archives is centre stage in Margaret Galvan’s debut monograph, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s. Across five concise chapters, Galvan examines how several American visual artists, including the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and photographer Nan Goldin, incorporate activism in their work and create a sense of collectivity. “All these women’s artworks shaped feminist futures,” Galvan writes, “but how they mobilized image and text together to plant the seeds for future community to bloom has been overlooked” (4).
Galvan locates her monograph in the fields of both archival studies and comics scholarship. Building on the work of Hilary Chute and Ramzi Fawaz, among other theorists, Galvan considers the “multilayered relationships between image and text” and examines how “publication venues frame our readings” of images (6-7). Specifically, Galvan pays close attention to the sequencing of comics, photographic slideshows, exhibition guides and other visual materials. How these cultural artefacts are produced, sequenced, displayed and stored contributes to their political and affective power, as well as their potential to build new communities.
Against a backdrop of the 1980s’ sex/porn wars, the phobic Reagan administration, and the AIDS epidemic, these feminist and queer visual practitioners were alert to ‘the hard-won and narrowly kept conditions of visibility for diverse sexual identities’.
The book’s title, In Visible Archives, embodies the tenuous and paradoxical nature of visibility, which Galvan seeks to underscore. For example, the scholar analyses art that is held in both accessible, established spaces and more precarious locations – some in university archives and campuses, while volunteers in community-based and grassroots spaces tend to other items. Indeed, the women artists featured in the text question the heightened visibility of some bodies over others through their aesthetic work. Against a backdrop of the 1980s’ sex/porn wars, the phobic Reagan administration, and the AIDS epidemic, these feminist and queer visual practitioners were alert to “the hard-won and narrowly kept conditions of visibility for diverse sexual identities” (1-2). Ensuring the continued visibility of minoritarian lives and identities is further echoed in the text’s structure, as Galvan closes each chapter with a short reflection titled “Archives and Afterlives”. These cumulative sections examine the contemporary resonances of queer and feminist art from the late twentieth century and allow Galvan to attend to the important but unfinished business of community-building and political activism.
In the opening three chapters of the book, Galvan focuses her investigation on the work of graphic artists and cartoonists. The first chapter explores the enduring legacy of the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality and the beginning of the Feminist Sex Wars. Galvan considers three graphic artists – Hannah Alderfer, Beth Jaker, and Marybeth Nelson – who designed the Barnard Conference’s accompanying handbook, Diary of a Conference on Sexuality. Focusing on its collage aesthetics, Galvan begins to underscore the centrality of the image to her analysis and argues that these three artists empowered women’s sexual identities through a visual form that “embraced rather than censored erotic representations” (49).
Reading across several grassroots and community-based archives […] Galvan demonstrates the importance of archival practices in ensuring the visibility of queer and queer-adjacent communities.
Chapter Two offers a series of close readings of the comics of two formative cartoonists: Lee Marrs and Roberta Gregory. In clear, straightforward prose, Galvan explores the pairs’ foundational and pioneering work in the lesbian comics scene and demonstrates how queer communities and subcultures were built through the publication and circulation of grassroots newspapers and zines, such as Gay Comix. At times in this chapter, the close reading and analysis verges on description, but this is a minor complaint. Alison Bechdel’s long-running series Dykes to Watch Out For is the primary concern of the third chapter – one of the book’s strongest. In this section, Galvan offers an adroit analysis of how Bechdel incorporates activism into her modes of artistic production. Reading across several grassroots and community-based archives – in addition to the collection of Bechdel’s papers at Smith College – Galvan demonstrates the importance of archival practices in ensuring the visibility of queer and queer-adjacent communities.
For the final two chapters of In Visible Archives, Galvan moves away from cartoons to survey the work of the writer Gloria Anzaldúa and the New York-based photographer Nan Goldin. The penultimate chapter attends to the drawings and sketches of Chicana feminist scholar Anzaldúa. Galvan argues for a renewed consideration of how Anzaldúa utilised visual storytelling as part of their educative practice. The final chapter contends with Goldin’s curatorial work in her seminal photobook, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and her 1990 exhibition, Witnesses: Against our Vanishing. Here, Galvan provides an inciteful analysis of how Goldin sequences her photographs and curates the work of others in order to “guard against loss” and preserve communities in the face of the AIDS epidemic (198).
The radical potential of art and the archive is unquestionable. What Galvan ultimately illustrates is the need to keep making art and to keep building community.
As the rights of those most vulnerable in society are unceremoniously stripped in the name of culture wars stoked by right-wing parties and politicians, visibility continues to be of the utmost importance. In Visible Archives is a timely intervention which continues Goldin’s project of guarding against loss. Galvan lucidly demonstrates the importance of community-based archives, activism and art and provides an accessible introduction to the work of several women visual artists of the 1980s. The radical potential of art and the archive is unquestionable. What Galvan ultimately illustrates is the need to keep making art and to keep building community.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Susan Sermoneta on Flickr.
Rethinking Drug Laws: Theory, History, Politics – review
In Rethinking Drug Laws: Theory, History, Politics, Toby Seddon analyses drug control policy and argues for a paradigm shift that decentres the West and recognises China’s historical and contemporary influence. Unpacking the complexity of drug law as a regulatory system, Seddon’s well-argued, insightful book calls for more inclusive, evidence-informed and democratic policymaking, writes Mark Monaghan.
Rethinking Drug Laws: Theory, History, Politics. Toby Seddon. Oxford University Press. 2023.
Based on forensic archival research, Rethinking Drug Laws: Theory, History, Politics by Toby Seddon is beautifully written and deeply insightful. Its central thesis is that we must decentre the West, especially when thinking about the origins of drug policy. Viewing drug policy from a Western vantage point is a blip because, as Seddon shows, China has long been a key player on the global stage, but drug policy analysis, with some exceptions, has not always recognised this. In this way, drug policy analysis has fallen into the trap of Occidentalism, providing a distorted view of the West’s prominence. Seddon sets out to show the folly of this and succeeds. Furthermore, he demonstrates that there are signs of regression toward the mean as China once again is becoming a primary global player, particularly through the belt and road initiative.
In drug control, inanimate objects – drugs – are not banned, but transactions that would otherwise constitute lawful economic activity are criminalised.
A defining feature of Seddon’s writing is the remarkable capacity for distilling complex historical narratives into an easily digestible schema. We see this clearly in the introduction, where he proposes a tripartite structure of race, risk and security arcs as ways to think about the origins of what has only recently become known as the “drug problem”. We are also introduced to another key idea that drug laws function through controlling the circulation of goods, ie, they are regulatory systems. In drug control, inanimate objects – drugs – are not banned, but transactions that would otherwise constitute lawful economic activity are criminalised. This is about the control of personal property rights. The right to personal property is not explicitly eroded through prohibition, but some transactions in relation to them become impermissible and there is no legal recourse for the right to conduct these transactions. In outlining this, the entire premise of drug control shifts from one of a struggle between the forces of prohibition and legalisation to understanding legalisation and prohibition within a broader system of regulation.
Seddon refers to regulatory systems as ‘exchangespace’. […] The basic premise of exchangespace is that ‘market behaviour and regulation are not separate realms but two sides of the same coin’.
Seddon elaborates on this over the following chapters and in doing so demonstrates a depth of research and scholarship that is genuinely cross-disciplinary, bringing in economics, sociology, history, political economy as well as insights from criminology, regulation theory and socio-legal perspectives. There is, however, method to this, which shapes and is shaped by the development of a new conceptual framework. Drawing on the work of Clifford Shearing and others, Seddon refers to regulatory systems as “exchangespace”, and this is painstakingly outlined in Chapter Two. The basic premise of exchangespace is that “market behaviour and regulation are not separate realms but two sides of the same coin”. The dimensions of exchangespace can be summarised as:
- Regulation operates in networks consisting of multiple dimensions and participants.
- Nodes are a key element of networks and facilitate communication across them. Analysis of networks should, therefore, look at the nodes because these are the locus within a system where various resources are mobilised in order to govern effectively.
- Not all nodes exert the same amount or kind of power in the network. The most economically powerful nodes can distort the smooth operation of the entire system.
- Networks adapt overtime. Consequently, policy does not stand still, it evolves and emerges in often unpredictable ways.
Seddon encourages us to focus on the network conditions that led to increasing control of certain substances (what we know as drugs), whilst permitting or at least freeing the trade in others (coffee, alcohol and tobacco) and to view these as complex systems.
Seddon encourages us to focus on the network conditions that led to increasing control of certain substances (what we know as drugs), whilst permitting or at least freeing the trade in others (coffee, alcohol and tobacco) and to view these as complex systems. In complex systems, the outcomes of policy depend on understanding where the starting point is. However, identifying starting points is almost impossible, not least, as Seddon contends, because we don’t yet have the theory and methods at our disposal to do so. The best we can do, then, is to try and understand elements of the wider network; that is, which nodes are exerting power in which contexts while acknowledging that these systems are unpredictable and constantly changing. Seddon uses this framework to explain the origins of Cannabis Social Clubs in Catalonia and the complex politics behind the patchy implementation of Heroin Assisted Treatment. In this way, we can start to explain the ways in which, for example, overdose prevention centres have been established in some locations and not others, or why and how drugs were decriminalised in Oregon, a decision that may now be reversed.
Seddon demonstrates how the origins of the current system can be traced to colonialism […] in the nineteenth century, even if we cannot pinpoint the exact starting point.
A complex system like drug policy can never revert to an earlier stage of development. Oregon’s post-decriminalisation society will not be the same as its pre-decriminalisation society. Fortunately, however, complex systems do have path dependency, and so it is possible, as Seddon does in Part II (Chapters Four and Five), to outline the chain of events that has led to the contemporary global drug regulatory system. Seddon demonstrates how the origins of the current system can be traced to colonialism (the race arc) in the nineteenth century, even if we cannot pinpoint the exact starting point. The key lesson here is that we need to look East rather than West to understand this. Here, the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century are a key reference point.
Taking an exchangespace perspective we see that the Opium Wars (1839-1842) were more than just about one country (Britain) establishing a right to export its products (opium) to a large market (China). More accurately, they represented a military contestation that focused on the boundaries between legal and illegal trade – a contestation that lies at the heart of drug control. The burgeoning temperance movement proved a powerful node alongside increasingly powerful US economic interests, which contributed to the realigning of opium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a product requiring control. The Opium Wars also represent – in the form of the second opium (Arrow) war – the first moment that drug control (as opium control) became a multinational affair. In this way we can draw a direct line from the Opium Wars to global drug prohibition fifty years later.
In Part III (Chapters Six and Seven) Seddon turns to the political nodes of the regulatory network, focusing on “what is at stake when drug laws and drug policy become a matter of political contestation”. The idea here is that within exchangespace, it is impossible to stand outside of politics, as the system is inherently political. Politics is a powerful node. This section draws heavily on Loader and Sparks’ conception of public criminology and the strategies that can be used to add coolant to heated debates.
To hand over decision making to experts is to abandon any hope for democratic politics as it replaces one system of domination (populist politics) with another (experts).
For Seddon, this should not simply mean that populist ideas – such as the “war on drugs” – are replaced with technocratic, evidence-based decisions. To hand over decision making to experts is to abandon any hope for democratic politics as it replaces one system of domination (populist politics) with another (experts). Arguably, that is why it has become more commonplace to speak of evidence-informed or evidence-inspired policy. However, Seddon provides a way out of that impasse by stating that “better politics” is required more than better evidence. This has two dimensions. First, we need a more careful analysis that focuses not only on the impact or harms of current drug policies (eg, criminalisation, stigmatisation, racist stereotyping) as they occur, but considers in depth and precision how the arcs of race, risk and security perpetuate this system. Secondly, on a practical level, a more cosmopolitan, comprehensive and inclusive deliberative democracy is required which can yield discernible change. Reforms in Catalonia and Oregon point to how this can be done, but also its precarity. Scaling it up and bringing in the voice of people who use drugs as part of a social movement is essential.
The text brings us almost full circle to how a better politics might lead to a more sophisticated, fairer form of market regulation.
Seddon points to the success of prison reform movements in France in the 1970s or the radical politics of mental health campaigning organisations which sought to foreground the voices of survivors of the psychiatric system as providing a blueprint. To this we could add decades of campaigning by disability rights activists, which have shown how positive change can occur with these strategies. There is no reason why drug policy should be any different. In this way, the text brings us almost full circle to how a better politics might lead to a more sophisticated, fairer form of market regulation. Ultimately, for Seddon, this means shifting the focus of social and political science away from the way the world is, towards the deeper thinking on the kind of world we want. This is the book’s challenge. It is us up to us to deliver.
Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: OneSideProFoto on Shutterstock.