Diversity, visibility, and lesbian narrative in Ruth Caudeli’s ¿Cómo te llamas? (2018) and Eva menos Candela (2018)

Abstract

This article analyses the 2018 Colombian films ¿Cómo te llamas? and Eva menos Candela , directed by Ruth Caudeli. Both cinematic texts explore the lives of two lesbian characters who live amidst heteropatriarchal contexts that tend to ignore or reject diverse identities. By examining these narratives authored and driven by women, this study illustrates how such cultural products offer unprecedented cinematic representations of lesbian and feminocentric subjectivities, revealing a performative, self-referential, and autobiographical nature. Informed by the works of Kate McNicholas Smith (2020) on twenty-first-century lesbian representations on-screen and Ochy Curiel (2013) on feminist lesbianism in the Colombian context, this article addresses Caudeli’s 2018 films as key cultural devices that posit an innovative, diverse, and lesbian discourse. The article recognizes how both productions amplify the deconstruction process that the heteronormative regime of Colombia has been going through since the 2000s and queer/ cuir representation in twenty-first-century Colombian and Latin American visual culture.