Imaging Identity: The Moving Image, Identity Politics, and the 1990s

In the 1990s, U.S. artists turned to film and video amidst heated debates about the possibilities and the limitations of identitarian politics. This panel revisits the 1990s as a historical period when artists used the moving image to devise complex strategies for querying their own identities as well as their connections to larger groups along the lines of race, gender, sexuality, and disability, as well as their intersections. In response to the AIDS Crisis, the Culture Wars, and neoliberalism, film and video offered artists a tool through which to interrogate the viability of identity as a basis for politics and a subject for art practice. Through strategies like self-reflexivity, fiction, deconstruction, and performance, filmmakers and artists like Cheryl Dunye, Gregg Bordowitz, Marlon Riggs, and Rea Tajiri attenuated, complicated, questioned, but also still ultimately foregrounded identity as a concept and an entry into broader questions of structural oppression and historical erasure. This panel historicizes this relationship between moving image art of the 1990s and identity politics, investigating the strategies moving image artists forged in this context and what they might teach us about the resurgence of identity-based art practice today.