ABSTRACT
The Huks of the Philippines’ peasant rebellion and the Viet Minh forces in Vietnam were the first major political and military organization in their countries to include and actively recruit women in their independence struggles. Huk ‘Amazons’ struggled to reconcile their personal desires for intimacy with the impersonal aims of the revolution, while the male dominated leadership enacted policies to regulate the personal passions of its members. Female Vietnamese guerrillas were also at their sexual prime, but unlike the Huks, there seemed to be no clear policy on sexual and personal relationships in the Viet Minh, and instead, women were consistently asked to sacrifice their personal and sexual needs. My brief comparison of the women in the Huk and Vietnamese revolution demonstrates that the personal is inextricably linked to the political, and that the women’s presence, and their unfailing, however conflicted, commitment to the struggle transform revolutionary movements to consider issues of gender and sexuality as seriously as military goals and political ideology.
