An analysis of Asian and South Asian masculinities requires a critical examination of how masculinity intersects with contemporary gender politics and how feminism and gender studies operate within institutional, academic, and social spaces. This raises an important question about whether the dominance of women-centred approaches within gender studies has, in some contexts, contributed to the marginalisation of men from the dominant discourse of gender.
Hegemony can prevail within academic and institutional spaces when particular voices, perspectives, and experiences become dominant while others are positioned as marginal. In many contexts, gender discourse has increasingly developed through women’s studies, gender centres, feminist organisations, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), with considerable attention given to women’s rights, gender-based discrimination, sexuality, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer identities, and related issues. These developments have made important contributions to challenging historical forms of discrimination against women. However, a critical question remains regarding whether the institutional dominance of women-centred approaches has sometimes limited the space available for examining men’s experiences, vulnerabilities, agency, and marginalisation.
A call to expand gender scholarship
This issue becomes particularly significant in the Asian and South Asian context, where gender relations cannot necessarily be understood through a simple binary of dominant men and marginalised women. Rural men, rural women, children, families, heterosexual relationships, same-sex relationships, transgender experiences, and fluid queer identities are embedded within complex social, cultural, economic, religious, and familial structures. Yet, much contemporary gender and sexuality discourse may remain concentrated within urban, institutional, professional, NGO, and academically privileged spaces. Consequently, there can be a disconnection between internationally circulating gender discourses and the lived experiences of ordinary men, women, and children in rural and culturally diverse communities.
The argument, therefore, is not an opposition to women’s rights or feminism. Rather, it is a call to expand gender scholarship so that masculinity is examined with the same intellectual seriousness as femininity. The neglect of men raises important questions about why some men become violent, emotionally withdrawn, socially isolated, sexually frustrated, or otherwise disconnected from their communities. Such questions cannot adequately be addressed by treating men simply as perpetrators and women simply as victims. They require an examination of how men and women live together, negotiate power and agency, construct relationships, experience social expectations, and reproduce or challenge gendered identities.
Masculinity must therefore be understood relationally. Men are not simply the opposite of women, nor can masculinity be reduced to patriarchal domination. Masculinities are produced through family, education, religion, culture, law, the media, sexuality, class, ethnicity, geography, technology, and political institutions. The experiences of a rural young man in South Asia, for example, may differ substantially from those of an urban professional man or a man situated within Western academic and cultural environments. These differences demand greater attention to Asian and South Asian masculinities as historically and culturally situated forms of the gendered experience.
The colonial history of South Asian societies adds another important dimension to this discussion. Contemporary gender categories and academic institutions did not emerge independently from colonial histories of knowledge production, governance, law, morality, and social classification. The postcolonial movement towards decolonising knowledge therefore requires examination not only of the marginalisation of women and sexual minorities but also of the ways in which particular understandings of masculinity have been constructed, regulated, and sometimes excluded from legitimate academic knowledge.
From this perspective, the concept of anti-feminism requires careful conceptualisation. It should not simply be used as a label for men who question particular feminist arguments. Instead, it can provide an entry point for examining the tensions that emerge when feminism becomes institutionalised within particular academic, professional, NGO, or policy environments. A critical study should ask whether disagreement with dominant feminist positions is always interpreted as anti-feminism, and whether such labelling can unintentionally discourage alternative perspectives on masculinity, gender relations, family life, sexuality, and social harmony.
The broader question is how gender scholarship can move beyond an exclusive women-centred framework towards a more relational understanding of gender. Feminist scholarship itself contains diverse theoretical traditions and has generated important critiques of patriarchy, power, inequality, and social exclusion. Masculinity studies can contribute to this intellectual tradition rather than simply positioning itself against it. The study of men and masculinities can therefore become a complementary epistemological project that expands the capacity of gender scholarship to understand the complexity of contemporary society.
Shaping masculinity through AI
This question becomes even more significant in the emerging age of artificial intelligence (AI), digital communication, and networked publics. From 2026 and towards 2035, masculinity will increasingly be shaped through AI-mediated communication, algorithmic cultures, social media, digital communities, platform politics, surveillance, emerging forms of digital citizenship, and new configurations of power. Young men are not merely consumers of these technologies; they are also subjects whose identities, desires, relationships, political expressions, and social behaviour are increasingly mediated by algorithmic systems.
AI and digital network publics may therefore create a new terrain in which masculinities are produced, contested, amplified, suppressed, and reconstructed. Questions of masculinity are consequently connected not only to gender and sexuality but also to law, ethics, morality, citizenship, digital rights, political power, algorithmic governance, and the future of social relationships.
Within this emerging context, masculinity provides an important premise for rethinking gender itself. Rather than assuming that men occupy an automatically dominant position in every social context, scholarship should examine the different forms of power and vulnerability experienced by men across class, geography, sexuality, age, culture, and institutional settings. At the same time, this should not erase the continuing structural inequalities experienced by women and sexual minorities. The challenge is to develop a more comprehensive gender framework capable of examining multiple forms of marginalisation simultaneously.
Such an approach could contribute to a more balanced understanding of gender relations in South Asia. It could investigate how men and women negotiate power and agency within families and communities; how young men experience contemporary expectations of masculinity; how gender institutions construct acceptable and unacceptable masculinities; and how digital technologies transform these processes. It could also examine how postcolonial societies negotiate inherited colonial categories while simultaneously confronting new forms of digital, algorithmic, and globalised power.
The central issue, therefore, is not whether feminism or masculinity studies should dominate gender scholarship. The more important question is whether gender scholarship can create sufficient intellectual space for multiple perspectives, including those that critically examine men’s experiences without dismissing the historical achievements of feminism. A genuinely inclusive gender epistemology should be capable of examining women, men, heterosexuality, same-sex relationships, transgender identities, queer identities, and other forms of gendered and sexual experience within their specific cultural and historical contexts.
In this sense, the study of masculinity is crucial for understanding the future of gender, particularly in the Global South. It provides an opportunity to reconsider how gender hegemony is produced, how men themselves can become marginalised within dominant gender discourses, and how gender institutions might reproduce particular assumptions about who can speak, whose experiences matter, and which forms of knowledge are considered legitimate.
The intersection of masculinity, feminism, postcoloniality, AI, digital publics, citizenship, and power therefore opens a significant new field of inquiry. The task is not to replace women-centred gender scholarship with men-centred scholarship, but to move towards a genuinely relational and plural understanding of gender in which the experiences of both women and men, and the diversity of sexual and gender identities, can be examined critically. Such an approach may provide a stronger epistemological foundation for understanding social harmony, gender relations, and the rapidly changing conditions of human identity in the AI-mediated societies of 2026–2035.
The writer is the head of the Kelaniya University’s mass communication department
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The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication