Join us for the keynote lecture for Zines Now!, a UVA Library year-long initiative showcasing the history of zines as an art form, highlighting future possibilities for the making and distribution of zines, and facilitating the expression of students’ and community members' passions and priorities now. Zines Now! is generously supported by the UVA Arts Council. 

When we talk about zines, we often discuss the riot grrrl and queercore movements, which critiqued the misogyny and homophobia of the punk music scene. Young feminists and queer individuals embraced zines, a DIY self-publishing format with no editorial rules or restrictions, building networks which spread the word about their subcultures and formed them into internationally known movements. Paralleling but independent of these movements, LGBTQ+ cartoonists took to zines to produce self-published comics. This talk surveys groups of LGBTQ+ cartoonists who made zines, most of whom were cataloged in Larry-bob Roberts' Queer Zine Explosion, which documented the scene. From cartoonists who were major queercore participants to communities of lesbian cartoonists who leveraged zines to network, queer cartoonists were everywhere in zines. In sharing various examples, I show how sexual minorities used zines to develop their work and build an audience, as they discussed nuanced, intersectional issues of sexual representation.

Margaret Galvan is Associate 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 an award-winning first book, In Visible Archives: Queer and Feminist Visual Culture in the 1980s (2023). She is researching a second book about how communities of LGBTQ+ cartoonists in the 1980s and 1990s innovated comics, which has been supported by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and Andy Warhol Foundation. Her publications on comics in social movements can be found in journals like American Literature, Archive Journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, iNKS, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and WSQ. See margaretgalvan.org for more information.