Editor's Note on "Dossier on Women and Video: Histories and Practices"

In North America, video and feminism have shared a history since the heady 1970s. There seems to be an almost "organic relationship," in contributor Laura Marks's phrase, "between the materiality of the medium and its expressive and political properties" for women. The contributions to this dossier on women and video invoke North America in the 1970s, because many of the issues that still haunt the medium were explored by women with remarkable force and insight in that period: video's notoriously "impure pedigree," its depiction of the body, its conditions of reception, its potential for documentation, its powerful capacity for expressing individual subjectivity and collaborative process, and its solicitation in the interest of raising consciousness and fostering community. Early versions of the essays collected here were presented at a panel I organized for the 2002 Society for Cinema Studies conference. The interview with Patty Chang supplements the varied critical histories with an example of contemporary practice that builds on past articulations of women and video. This dossier represents Camera Obscura's ongoing interest in the vicissitudes of video in the digital age.