“The opportunity to live in a society where violence has no place demands a different and inclusive kind of masculinity. A way of being a man that is built for peace, that is rooted in care and refuses to accept exclusion, marginalization, and criminalization as the norm. We change, one man at the time"

-Sebastián Molano, founder of DGR

Defying Gender Roles aims to create change at the individual level as a way to affect society. 

Our VISION

• Empower men to question what it means to be a man today and to reflect on how gender roles inform our actions and affect our lives. 

• Contribute to deconstructing harmful male gender roles in society while offering expansive alternatives rooted in care.

• Expose practices, behaviors, and attitudes that justify and perpetuate gender inequality and violence.

• Engage women and non-binary people actively in this conversation, as gender equality is about recognizing how people experience life differently and take actions that allow them all to fully exercise their rights and live the life they wish to live.

• Promote the full exercise of human rights for all and their enjoyment.

• Create a world where men and boys can be themselves and live expansive, caring lives.
  

OUR MISSION

To create critical reflection and action to address harmful gender roles and norms focusing on the idea and practices of man, manhood, and masculinity using an intersectional feminist approach.

Defying Gender Roles (DGR) seeks to expose alternative ways of understanding masculinity in men, as well as by openly questioning attitudes, behaviors, and actions that are directed against gender equality.

Through this, DGR strives to break down antagonistic relationships, such as the good man versus the bad man, the alpha male versus the beta male. It is an effort to recognize the nuances of masculinity, the complexities and contradictions of being a man today. In addition, it is an opportunity to build bridges of understanding between men and women, and among ourselves, regardless of age, sexual orientation, race, religion, or nationality.

Our Values

Humans are much more complex than what traditional gender roles have assigned us.

The cornerstone of this process of liberation is critical reflection. This means a purposeful introspective process that invite us to review what informs our actions, attitudes, and beliefs around gender. We understand gender as a structural power relation. As such, the way in which each of us experience gender is deeply personal.  Gender is one of the fundamental pieces of who we are, how we see the world, and how the world perceives us. However, it is not the only factor that shape our experience in life. As result, in DGR we strongly believe that we need to take into consideration other key factors such as race, sex, religion, ability, age and class.