Clara Sarmento 
Eastwards / Westwards 
Which Direction for Gender Studies in the 21st Century?

Eastwards / Westwards: Which Direction for Gender Studies in the XXIst Century? is a collection of essays which focus on themes and methods that characterize the current research on gender in Asian countries in general, under a comparative approach that tries to cut across the boundaries of time and space. In this collection, ideas derived from Gender Studies as they are practised all over the world have been subjected to scrutiny for their utility in helping to describe and understand regional phenomena. But the concepts of ‘local’ and ‘global’-with their discoursive productions-have not functioned here as a binary opposition: localism and globalism are mutually constitutive and the authors have interrogated those spaces of interaction between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, bearing in mind their own embeddedness in social and cultural structures and their own historical memory.Eastwards / Westwards: Which Direction for Gender Studies in the XXIst Century? provides a critical transnational perspective on some of the complex effects of the dynamics of cultural globalization, by exploring the relation between gender and education, politics, economics, anthropology, linguistics, historiography, sociology, literature, and popular culture, as agents of the (re)invention of old and new, male and female identities, their conversion into concepts and their circulation through time and space.