A term that can be used to refer to issues of cultural appropriation that may arise in creative work. The idea is connected to identity politics, which involves people re-appropriating their socially coded identities (e.g., straight black man) and taking control of the definition of them and their presentation in mainstream culture.
If a group in a privileged position (men, white people, straight people, wealthy people, able-bodied people, etc) in a society largely controls the media or other means of representing reality in a culture, there are political ramifications. For instance, no women were allowed on the stage in Elizabethan England. The plays of Shakespeare and others were performed by an entirely male cast, with boys and men playing the female roles in costume.
Critics point to how this allowed men to control how women were represented in the entertainment culture of the day, and many of us now see this as a politically important example of inequity: the unequal access to self-representation by a socially-coded identity position.
In the heyday of the minstrel shows, white performers performed a parody or distortion of black “reality” on the stage for audiences of white people. In this situation, the white performers controlled how the audiences viewed or imagined African Americans. From an identity politics point of view, this was an abuse of power and a distortion of reality that mostly benefited the white powers of those days.