ABSTRACT
The generic innovation of its narrative and the aesthetics in action practiced by its Black lesbian writer/director, Cheryl Dunye, all contribute to the significance and originality of her independent film, 2001’s Stranger Inside. Dunye determined that she would make films about women like herself, Black women and lesbians whose stories have not been told when she heard Spike Lee say that if people did not like his representations of Black women, they should go make their own films. For Stranger, the director’s second feature film, she used the women-in-prison (WIP) genre to represent a highly marginalized population – incarcerated women and lesbians of color. The film exhibits her signal creative strategies and concerns: to use and experiment with popular genres, to represent marginalized women in and through their own words and lives, and to question and innovate the racialized structure of visual representation and historical meaning by blurring and troubling the binaries upon which those structures have depended. These binaries include fiction/documentary, history/imagination, and theory/creative practice, among others.
