This presentation investigates the role cultural products and practices produced, narrated and/or inspired by women and members of the LGBTQ community of the early 21st century play in Colombia in the context of public debates about writing and documenting the historical legacies of violence, and in the process of memory construction practices. I intend to analyze the ways in which various novels, fictional films and testimonial practices contribute to the understandings of historical crises that exceed those that emerge from the dominant political debate and legal practices instituted by the State. The texts and practices that stand out here (The novel Un Mundo Huerfano (2016) and films like Birds of passage (2018), among others) articulate- from a feminist and queer perspective- various tragedies caused by the Colombian armed conflict and drug trafficking to reflect on the ways in which these may or may not be remembered and repaired, critically intervening in the interpretative processes of the violence of the last decades in a fundamental historical moment in which Colombian society debates how to remember the recent past and how to speak of his victims. For example, in Birds of passage (2018) we witness two simultaneous stories. First, the splendor and decline of an indigenous family of the Wayúu people from La Guajira, a region located in northern Colombia, and at the same time, the historical beginnings of the illicit drug trafficking business and its corrupting impact on the social and cultural traditions on this community. While the story refers to the recurring Colombian history of violence generated by the illegal drugs trade, Cristina Gallego y Ciro Guerra's film undoes the male narrative about drug trafficking and its violence, where women were silenced or victimized. On this occasion, it is a woman in the role of Úrsula who is responsible for dismantling the male versions of drug trafficking violence, narrating an own version unknown to most. However, she does not do it from a victimized and innocent position, but through an openly ambiguous narrative without idealizations that reveals the moral, psychological and physical degeneration of her community.
This project intends to map the way in which these productions explore the relationship between violence and language, and the generic-sexual dimensions of violent dynamics, while questioning conventional representations of the victims in the official post-conflict discourses that circulate with great force in today's Colombia.
