East Asian Masculinities at the Collision of State, Capital, and Renqing

Introduction: The Global Turn and East Asian Configurations of MasculinityWhen China's state media launched campaigns against "sissy" celebrities in 2021, targeting the soft masculinity aesthetics that Korean and Japanese pop culture had been circulating globally for decades, the contradictions animating contemporary East Asian masculinities became impossible to ignore.South Korea's Hallyu phenomenon had transformed "floral boy" aesthetics into global cultural capital even as domestic antifeminist backlash intensified, with young men mobilizing resentment through "masculinity politics" (Kim 2018).In Japan, policymakers promoted "domesticated salarymen" through marriage-promotion initiatives, even as patriarchal household divisions proved remarkably durable.China's "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy framed aggressive nationalism as postcolonial resistance to Western cultural hegemony even as the state drew criticism for neo-colonial expansion (Yang and Yang 2025).These are more than cultural curiosities.They are critical sites of gendered tension that illustrate how masculinities in the region's most dynamic economies are being forged through asynchronous and often contradictory pressures (ideological, geopolitical, and affective).Existing frameworks often struggle to capture the full texture of these gender transformations.Over three decades, critical masculinities studies has widened its empirical reach and sharpened its tools for analyzing global gender orders.Since Connell's (1998) call in the inaugural issue of Men and Masculinities to "pay attention also to very large-scale structures," the field has undertaken a necessary global turn.