Dr. Galvan reconceives the legacy of Gloria Anzaldúa, who is well-known for her challenge of white feminism in This Bridge Called My Back and creation of new subject positions for Chicana women in Borderlands / La Frontera including her theorization of mestiza consciousness. This event examines Anzaldúa as a visual queer theorist and shows how drawing was an important part of her theorizing across her career. It focuses on how she illustrated these concepts when she gave public talks about her scholarship. It discusses how her drawings of mestiza consciousness radiated intersectionality avant la lettre and welcomed a diverse grouping of other individuals into community with her. This event connects to part of Dr. Galvan’s book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s, which analyzes how visual culture provided a vital space for women artists to theorize and visualize their own bodies and sexualities.

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, 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.

Co-sponsored by the UIS Diversity Center and the UIS Women’s Center