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<h2><big>Women up in arms: Zapatistas and Rojava Kurds embrace a new
gender politics</big></h2>
<h4>Charlotte Maria Sáenz</h4>
<h4>2015-03-25, Issue <a
href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/719">719</a></h4>
<h4><a href="http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/94283">http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/94283</a></h4>
Resistance and strength manifest like weeds through cracks in
Chiapas, Mexico, and transnational Kurdistan where the respective
Zapatista and Kurdish resistance movements are creating new gender
relations as a primary part of their struggle and process for
building a better world. In both places, women’s participation in
the armed forces has been an entry-point for a new social
construction of gender relations based on equity. <br>
<br>
While the Kurds have been fighting for their survival against ISIS
in the Syrian/Turkish border town of Kobane, the Zapatistas put down
their arms over 20 years ago and have maintained a non-violent
struggle since. In both cases, women have fought alongside men
against their own collective obliteration while making radical
changes in their gender relations. Working towards more equity makes
possible more direct democracy in building greater autonomy from the
state.[1] In both efforts, there is also a deep connection to
land[2] that regards the value of women and the environment as
essential to life itself. <br>
<br>
In both resistances, women took up arms to fight alongside their
male counterparts showing both willingness and capacity to fight as
soldiers. However their principal objective in the mountains is not
military. Rather, their most important task is to form new persons:
men and women in a more equitable relationship to each other--a
relationship that is also anti-capitalist. <br>
<br>
“Above everything, we want for our militancy to create a new
personality, one that is in complete contradiction to capitalism,”
says a representative of the Kurdish Committee of Jineology (a
committee of and for women founded by the transnational PKK (Partiya
Karkerên Kurdistanê), the Kurdish Workers Party.[3] Theirs is a
commitment to building democracy, socialism, ecology and feminism. <br>
<br>
The Zapatistas made a similar commitment to more equitable gender
relations. One of the first things to come out of their armed
uprising in 1994 was the Revolutionary Law of Women. This law
spelled out 10 new rules giving women unprecedented power over their
lives, including choosing whether and whom to marry, the right to
serve on governing councils, and the right to bear arms as
milicianas, militia fighters, in the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN in Spanish). Zapatista women also asked for the law
to include a prohibition of drugs and alcohol, in order to address
one of the main causes of domestic violence. After the ceasefire
only twelve days after the uprising, many women soldiers
transitioned to a non-military political life taking unprecedented
positions of governance, education, administration, and
decision-making—another way of taking up in arms, this time with
each other and with men.<br>
<br>
For the last 21 years, both men and women have been in a process of
unlearning old gender norms, relearning how to be and relate to each
other anew, sharing both domestic and public duties. Although the
construction of gender equity is still in progress, these new
relations between men and women have been a fundamental component of
the construction of Zapatista autonomy itself.<br>
<br>
These radical changes in gender relations are occurring in contexts
of tremendous violence and war of both high and low intensity. In
Kobane, near the Turkish border, Kurds have been upholding a heroic
resistance to the ravages of ISIS on the one hand, and the racist
and repressive manipulations of the Turkish State on the other. In
Chiapas, the Zapatistas have been building their autonomy within the
increasing violence of a narco-state that dominates much of the
nation, where it is hard to discern the difference between
government and drug traffickers. <br>
<br>
In nearby Guerrero--a southwestern state in Mexico also known for
its rich natural resources, intense drug trafficking, resistance
movements and community policing--women have also joined the armed
ranks of the policia comunitaria. These armed patrols have risen to
fill the vacuum left by corrupt police on the narco-payroll, and are
on the rise in various other communities across the country. Men and
women are fighting together on these different frontlines, sometimes
crossing state and national borders to join in combat, like the many
young anarchist women from Turkey who crossed in busses into Syria
to help the Kurds in Kobane resist ISIS in the past months. <br>
<br>
Certain parts of the 30 year-old Kurdish resistance have also taken
on the project of forging more equal relations between men and women
as a crucial part of their political project. With Kurds spread
across Turkey, Syria and Iraq, the geopolitical concept of Kurdistan
has been expanded trans-nationally into what some are describing as
a “Democratic Confederalism” that transcends nation-state borders.
This is an aspiration as of yet, not a fully developed reality, nor
one embraced by all Kurds. These ideas are mainly derived from the
evolving writings of the leader of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK),
Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999. His
“Democratic Confederalism” aims to build a new system that works
towards the just distribution of resources as well as the
conservation of the environment. It seeks to create a society free
of sexism, replacing traditional patriarchal societies, religious
interpretations, and capitalist merchandising of women. The movement
has undertaken an intense societal and educational labor to combat
the patriarchal mentalities implanted in women, as a form of
submission, and in men, in form of domination.[4] <br>
<br>
Zapatista and Kurdish resistances have taken on a radical paradigm
shift that changes everything. In the Zapatista autonomous municipal
administration center called “Caracol de Oventic”, there is an
“Office for Women’s Dignity” where women gather to discuss the
successes and failures of the Revolutionary Law of Women. Similarly,
the PKK’s “Jineology Committee” studies women’s histories to
understand the construction of hierarchies and nation-states that
erode women’s power in society. Both communities come from intense
patriarchal histories and contexts, so there is still a long way to
go in both movements. Yet in a short time they have made
extraordinary gains. Women are increasingly represented on governing
councils and active in their armed ranks, but the real revolution is
seen within the domestic sphere, where caring for children, health
and home are shared labor between men and women. Both Kurds and
Zapatistas offer a living example of what is not only possible, but
of what is already being practiced and grown.[5] <br>
<br>
Working towards what the Zapatistas would call an “Other” way of
relating to each other, men and women traverse spaces of war as well
as of pastoral, agricultural and domestic care--learning with and
from each other whether in the battlefields or making food. It is in
these everyday practices of building autonomy that we begin to
unearth the possibility of another kind of life, of another way of
knowing, being with and relating to each other that can create and
nourish better ways of living. It starts with making patriarchal
habits visible. Constructing more equitable relations means a daily
practice of better, kinder ways of relating between men and women.
This is the learning for all of us to put into practice within our
own places and with our own people, not only up in arms, but also
arm in arm…abrazándonos, embracing each other.<br>
<br>
* Charlotte Maria Sáenz is Media and Education Coordinator for Other
Worlds and teaches at the California Institute for Integral Studies
in San Francisco.<br>
<br>
END NOTES<br>
<br>
[1]For example, Mesoamerican asambleas or the first Sumerians and
the decentralized organizations of clan and tribal configurations as
described in “El confederalismo democrático: propuesta libertaria
del pueblo kurdo.” ALB Noticias en Mar, 17 septiembre 2013.<br>
[2] “Land and Liberty” has been the rallying cry of the Zapatistas,
both then and now, while “Land or Death” the slogan heard in the
Botan district today as reported by Heysam Mislim in “Kobane Diary:
4 Days Inside the City Fighting an Unprecedented Resistance Against
ISIS,” Newsweek, October 15, 2014.<br>
[3] Committee of Jineology as quoted by Jorge Ricardo Ottino,
writing for Resumen Latinoamericano from mountains of Xinêre, areas
of media defense, South Kurdistan, Republic of Iraq, 3rd July 2014.<br>
[4] “El confederalismo democrático: propuesta libertaria del pueblo
kurdo.” ALB Noticias en Mar, 17 septiembre 2013.<br>
[5] For a more in-depth description of the Kurdish Women’s movement
see <a
href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/necla-acik/kobane-struggle-of-kurdish-women-against-islamic-state">https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/necla-acik/kobane-struggle-of-kurdish-women-against-islamic-state</a>
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