ABSTRACT
In the first sentence of the anthropological collection Dislocating Masculinity:Comparative Ethnographies, the editors Cornwall and Lindisfarne state that “[o]ver the last few years there has been a surge of interest in the study of men and masculinity. We are told that on both sides of the Atlantic men are starting to respond to the challenges of feminism” (Cornwall and Lindisfarne 1994, 1). Indeed, the book does cover topics such as Greek sexuality, prostitutes' clients and gay male identities as well as masculine practices in countries in Europe, America and Africa. However, it has no chapters that focus on Asian masculinities. By disregarding half of mankind, it ends up offering analyses that distort comparative understandings of different masculinities in the global context. Such distortions have been a common feature of men studies in the West, and in the 1990s a number of researchers became “aware how far we still are from realising the type of inclusive scholarship we would find ideal” (Brod and Kaufman 1994, 6).
