In search of equality: women, the "new man" and guerrilla masculinities in the Zapatista Urban Front (FUZ) (1959-1970)

Abstract

This article poses as a problem the existing tension between the counter-hegemonic guerrilla masculinities with the hegemonic masculinities. To account for this, the history of the emergence of the Zapatista Urban Front (FUZ), an armed nucleus of urban guerrillas that operated between 1970 and 1972, is explored. I will pay attention to the phenomenon of the exclusion of women in the first stage of the organization. Armed, finding some patriarchal stereotypes inherited from Guevarism according to which women were conceived with less capacity for war, an issue that justified their exclusion in some actions. At this point it is explained how men disempowered themselves and accepted a horizontal and democratic direction in which women were placed on a more equal plane. It will be explored what tensions existed around this egalitarian project and to what extent the departure of two members of the armed group has gender undertones, which reveal the exercise of a guerrilla masculinity that resisted the predominance of women in political and military decisions.