Una voz antifeminista? María Mercedes Carranza, Public Intellectual and “Postmodern” Poet

Abstract

This chapter analyses the work of María Mercedes Carranza (1945–2003), one of the foremost Colombian female poets of the late twentieth century, who has received little international critical attention. Elston provides a timely re-reading of her poetry, often simply read as expressing a feminist perspective, to explore the complex position of the woman writer and intellectual in Colombia. Discussing her strategic disavowal, like many Latin American women writers, of feminist politics, the chapter unpicks Carranza’s contradictory stance towards feminist writing and shows how her work is bound up with the problematics of Colombian modernity in a context defined by political violence. Elston argues that the poet destabilizes critical trajectories through her endorsement of both Enlightenment values and their postmodern critiques.