Regimes of Colombianidad

Argues that Colombian media culture has been a central vehicle for manufacturing consent for a patriarchal social order.

Regimes of Colombianidad addresses the gender politics of media culture in a country where endless non-symbolic violence has been the primary focus of academic interest. Examining three tropes in contemporary Colombian media—beauty, citizenship, and sex—the book draws out the historical significance of ideals of the body in the nation-building process since independence with a focus on the twenty-first century. Taking the Miss Colombia pageant as a starting point for the contextualization of beauty politics, Isis Giraldo seriously engages with the "men's magazine" SoHo, popular telenovelas, and mainstream periodicals in manufacturing consent for patriarchal, postfeminist understandings of subjectivity, national belonging, and sexual liberation. Regimes of Colombianidad decenters and provincializes northern debates about postfeminism while globalizing Latin American decolonial critique. In Giraldo's reading, postfeminism functions less as a sensibility than as a global technology of colonial power that spans the political spectrum, enacting coloniality across both its liberal and conservative ends.