Painting, Literature and Film in Colombian Feminine Culture, 1940-2005: Of Border Guards, Nomads and Women (Monografías A)

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 unstudied 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 which territorialize femininity and provided alternative models which free women from theirpassive 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 trajectory in 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 AmericanCultural Studies at the University of Bath.