BDSM, and homoerotic portraits of black nude men, the explicit sexual imagery of Mapplethorpe's work sparked a debate on what taxpayer's money should fund. US law would prevent federal money from being used to "promote, encourage or condone homosexual activities," which also led to AIDS programs being defunded. From 1987, the central government in the UK would ban local councils from using public funds to "promote homosexuality". American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon provided an artistic response that critiqued both the conservative ideology that stoked the culture wars and Mapplethorpe's problematic imagery of queer black men. Responding to Mapplethorpe's The Black Book (1988), a photographic series of homoerotic nude black men that failed to consider the subjects within broader histories of racialised violence and sexuality, Ligon created the work Notes on the Margin of the Black Book (1991-1993). Shown at the 1993 Whitney Biennial, Ligon framed every page of Mapplethorpe's book in its original order, installing them in two rows on a wall, between them inserting around seventy framed texts relating to race from diverse sources, such as historians, philosophers, religious evangelists, activists, and curators. By suggesting Mapplethorpe's work to be a projection of fears and desires upon the black male body, Ligon demonstrates the entanglement of sex, race, and desire, part of his larger practice of investigating the construction of black identity through words and images. Identity politics would thus further develop in response to right-wing, conservative and religious groups' attempts to suppress queer voices in public. Within the framework of identity politics, identity functions "as a tool to frame political claims, promote political ideologies, or stimulate and orient social and political action, usually in a larger context of inequality or injustice and with the aim of asserting group distinctiveness and belonging and gaining power and recognition." Activist group the Gay Liberation Front would propose queer identity as a revolutionary form of social and sexual life that could disrupt traditional notions of sex and gender. More recently, however, critics have questioned the effectiveness of an identity politics consistently operates as a self-defined, oppositional "other". Running parallel with queer art are the discourses of feminism, which had paved the way for sex-positive queer culture and attempts to dismantle oppressive patriarchal norms. For instance, the work of Catherine Opie operates strongly within a feminist framework, further informed by her identity as a lesbian woman, though she has stated that queerness does not