Prospectus Presentation: Carol Pinzon

Prospectus Presentation and Comprehensive Exam 
Carol Pinzon
Thursday, September 26, 2025 2:00-5:00 PM
Zoom: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/93221671878  and in Machmer E24

Title: Embodies Transitions: Female Ex-Combatants and the Gendered Realities of Colombia's Post-Agreement Period

Abstract: 
In 2016, the lives of 3,500 female insurgents in Colombia took a radical turn. After more than half a century of violent confrontations, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) guerrilla and the national government signed a historic peace agreement. Since then, former women soldiers have faced the stigma of their experience of war and their responsibility for reconciliation, memory, truth, and reparation. They embody the challenges and ambiguities of the transitional period. My project examines the reconfiguration of gendered subjectivities among female ex-combatants during Colombia’s post-agreement period. It seeks to understand how they embody the pressures of social expectations and the unspoken traces of political violence while also opening spaces for contestation and the redefinition of imposed social roles.

I will undertake 15 months of research in Colombia. I will collaborate with Casa de la Paz, an ex-combatant organization based in Bogotá. I will utilize a multimodal methodology that includes discourse analysis, collective ethnography, and art-based research strategies.

The peace accords between the FARC guerrilla and the Colombian government represent an ideal case to gain a deeper understanding of gendered subjectivities amid the multiple temporalities of war. By attending to the embodied and ineffable dimensions of women ex-combatants’ experiences, this project opens new avenues for analyzing how political violence persists and how gendered expectations are reconfigured in transitional contexts.