Introduction

Summary

Como tocar la ventana, y que me salga una loretana

Me dice que ella es tan bella, igual o más que mi colombiana

The Colombian salsa group Niche's 1989 hit, ‘Me sabe a Perú’, now a classic throughout Latin America, is a celebration of Colombia's relationship with a bordering country with which, not so long ago, it had been at war, and a call for unity between the two nations. It is also an illustration of how femininities circulate within discourse as markers of borders and territories, specific femininities being ideologically bound up with a sense of place or belonging, the idea of ‘woman’ bearing the symbolic weight of community. Femininity itself can also be seen as symbolic territory, ripe for inscription with meaning and political power, whether functioning as a part of patriarchal ideology, or re-appropriated and perhaps re-signified by feminists. This book traces the ways in which women in Colombia – through painting, literature and film – have critiqued, and sometimes repeated (as the ‘loretana’ purportedly does), discourses which territorialize femininity, whether nationally, regionally or ideologically. It also explores the way in which women artists and theorists in Colombia have provided alternative models, which free women from their passive or allegorical representational status as border guards and re-think feminine subjectivity, taking it into new symbolic territories.