Hacia una meta - (de) construcción de lo masculino. Una investigación basada en un grupo operativo centrado en violencias de género y masculinidades para sensibilizar sobre el acoso sexual universitario

Abstract

This research highlights the importance of working in group spaces with men, aggressors and masculinities to eradicate gender violence and sexual harassment within universities. It is part of an action-research process in the project "Psychosocial intervention and gender violence: dilemmas and challenges" that has been developing since 2017 in higher education institutions in Ecuador and it is on its sixth phase. This research is based on a Grupo Operativo focused on gender violence and masculinities, developed to raise awareness about university sexual harassment and opening up processes of critical reflection on the participant's realities, directed to gender and masculinities. Understanding them as categories learned and introduced by the culture and as a role that fulfills the function of an ideal to pursue, very attached to traditional hegemonic masculinities, which respond to a mandate of masculinity that men must obey, as a unique role to exercise with which they establish relations based in power and inequality that are the base of all the ways they express and link with other people. During the process, tensions and polarizations between traditional and alternative views were identified. However, from a point of inflection, the questioning of the conceptions around gender violence and masculinities was evident, some ideas and preconceived beliefs were diluted, they managed to re-signify various stereotypes on which they structured their realities and modified them (some more than others), in their own way, pace and at different levels.