The feminine: aesthetics, territories, politics

To study the work of several generations of women artists risks essentialism, as any attempt to outline a generic discourse, aesthetics or politics rests on the assumption of some shared quality in the work or in the women who have produced it. Although I have sometimes referred to the artists here as searching for or creating a feminine language, I have been motivated less by the imperative to define a specific Colombian feminine culture than by the desire to consider how a plurality of different voices sometimes overlaps, how parallels arise in the framing of women's experience or in the strategies adopted for speaking from a marginal position. It is neither possible nor desirable, therefore, to conclude by proposing a shared style or politics, but rather to further consider these overlaps and parallels, to further work through the messy and contradictory nature of sexual politics as it arises here, beginning with a discussion of the thorny term ‘feminine’ as it arises in the works under discussion and as important conceptual territory for feminist theory both Latin American and metropolitan. This will lead to further elaboration on the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship as it occurs in these works but also in theory, drawing on feminist readings of concepts of nomadism and becoming first in relation to theories of the girl or daughter, and also, perhaps more radically, in relation to the maternal.