Painting, Literature and Film in Colombian Feminine Culture, 1940-2005

This book explores crucial moments in the emergence of feminine culture in Colombia through the work of ground-breaking artist Débora Arango, best-selling novelist Laura Restrepo, and three generations of documentary filmmakers.

Women artists, writers and filmmakers in Colombia have consistently foregrounded the relationship between gender and the often violent processes which have marked the country's history over the past century. This book explores crucial moments in the emergence of feminine culture in Colombia hitherto unexamined in English-language criticism through an examination of the work of ground-breaking artist Débora Arango, best-selling novelist Laura Restrepo, andthree generations of documentary filmmakers.
Deborah Martin shows how Colombian women writers and artists have critiqued discourses that territorialize femininity and provided alternative models that free women from their passive or allegorical representational status as border guards, re-thinking feminine subjectivity and taking it to new symbolic territories. The book's approach---comparing art, literature and film---reveals a resistive trajectoryin dialogue with dominant tendencies in Colombian feminist theory, itself the product of an intellectual sphere conditioned by the need to think about political violence.

DEBORAH MARTIN is a Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies at University College London.