Clare Hall PhD Candidate Ange La Furcia has won the Harold Blakemore Prize and has received an honorary mention of the Carlos Monsiváis Award by the Sexualities Studies Section in LASA, Vancouver for the second time.

Ange La Furcia completed a BA first-class honors with distinction in Sociology at Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia (2009-2014) and a Master’s degree with distinction in Gender Studies, Politics, and Sexuality at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences EHESS, Paris, France (2017-2019). She is also a graduate of École Normale Supérieure de Paris, Rue d’Ulm, with a major in Social Sciences and a minor in “Languages and Cultures of the Arab and Muslim World” (2016-2020). She has previously been awarded the Honorary mention of the prize Carlos Monsiváis 2016, Section on Sexualities in Latin American Studies Association for the article “Pigmentocracy of desire in the trans sexual market in Cali, Colombia” co-authored with Emeritus Professor Fernando Urrea. New York, 29 May 2016. 

An article based on her research on the lived experiences of trans women’s beauty in the Colombian Insular Caribbean has been published last year in Espaço Ameríndio Review in Brazil. She is currently conducting fieldwork in the Colombian Insular Caribbean (i.e., San Andrés, Providence, and Ketlina) for her PhD research on beauty, racism, and care at the Centre of Latin American Studies.

Ange developed an analysis titled “Denunciation, Politics, and Beauty in San Andrés Islands: A Caribbean Telenovela of Sexuality and Corruption,” which she had recently the honor of presenting, and was awarded the Harold Blakemore prize, a key figure on Latin American studies in the UK, for the best paper presented at the Society for Latin American Studies.

This paper analyses a scandal provoked in 2017 by Norman Alford Pusey Pomare, a trans Raizal beauty queen trainer and candidate for the Departmental Assembly of the Archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia, and Santa Catalina as a prelude to the dismantling of a scheme of corruption that resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two liberal party governors of the islands and other persons associated with the fraudulent contracting network. Based on an in-situ ethnography and a documentary analysis of judicial, governmental, local, and national press archives, the research approaches the ways in which sexuality permeates the language of denunciation, the aesthetics of the accusation, and the uses of insult. The study highlights the foundation of the insular social bond on new bases and offers an understanding of the games of opportunism, cunning, clientelist networks, and family dynasties that are reconfigured alongside demands for equal treatment and challenges to abuses of power.

The article will be available to read in English in the Bulletin of Latin American Research. The Spanish version of this paper has been published in the Cuadernos del Caribe Review at the National University of Colombia, Caribbean Headquarters, where Ange is a visiting scholar.

The Honorary mention of the Carlos Monsiváis award was given for her article “Jellyfish Antics,” which explores the lived experiences of trans women’s beauty on the island of San Andres in Colombia. It seeks to answer the question about the implications that territory, beauty, and insularity have on their biographical trajectories as a support for the affirmation of respectability, individuality, and self-esteem to circumvent social contempt, racism, and discrimination. Through ethnographies of the hunch and the review of literature on communal life and trans identities from the region and the Global South, the tensions generated by these experiences in the community ecology are addressed. The reflection elucidates the creative and agentic strategies in which trans women make their way and accentuate their presence during the transformations of the insular social bond.

“Jellyfish Antics” can be accessed on the Espaço Ameríndio journal page, or downloaded through academia.edu.

We extend our wholehearted congratulations to Ange and wish her the best of luck!