Mujer, diversidad y cine en Colombia: perspectivas de género e imágenes de la mujer en el siglo XXI

The representation of women in Colombian cinema has tended to be associated with notions of submission, victimization, or sexualization, suggesting a certain uniformity, invisibility, and repetition regarding their social and cinematic existence. Despite this cultural and historical complexity, there are several Colombian productions made in the new millennium that transcend patriarchal gender biases and moral dichotomies about women on the big screen. Considering the enactment of the Cinema Law 814 of 2003, which has had a positive impact on the Colombian film sector, this book proposes to examine in an unprecedented, joint, and critical manner diverse ways in which women are represented in a group of Colombian fiction films of the twenty-first century. Under an interdisciplinary prism of film, feminist, postcolonial, and subaltern studies, this work offers a thematic approach and a textual analysis of a total of twelve films to examine images of women in Colombian cinema, recognizing their roots in the norms established by patriarchy and their eventual transgressions. In this way, this book explores and invites the reader to celebrate diverse and emerging representations of women by understanding silence and submission as subversive factors, the types of women’s emancipation within groups outside the law, and women’s sexuality and desire as agents of change when speaking of femininity. This work argues that the Cinema Law created a space for filmmakers to represent the limits of hegemonic gender norms in Colombian society and the efforts carried out to challenge them through its cinema.