How colonial medicine’s blind spots on masculinity, race, and power distort global men’s health equity
Original framing: “[Perspectives] Derek Griffith: transformative leader in men's health” — The Lancet
The Lancet’s piece centres Griffith while silencing the voices of men who are *most* affected by these disparities but least heard in global health discourse. For example, *Dalit men* in India experience health crises tied to caste-based violence and manual labour, yet their struggles are rarely framed as ‘men’s health’ issues. Similarly, *LGBTQ+ men* of colour face compounded risks from both homophobia and racial profiling in healthcare, yet Griffith’s work makes no mention of intersectional frameworks like *Kimberlé Crenshaw’s* *intersectionality* or *José Esteban Muñoz’s* *disidentification*. Even within Western contexts, *working-class men* in the UK’s *Rust Belt* have seen their health decline due to austerity—yet their voices are absent from ‘holistic’ health narratives dominated by elite academics.
Griffith’s critique exposes a fundamental tension in global health: the same institutions that claim to ‘innovate’ in men’s health are built on colonial architectures that treat masculinity as a universal biological category while ignoring how power—racial, economic, and imperial—shapes who gets to be ‘healthy.
’ The Lancet’s framing obscures this by elevating Griffith as a *leader* rather than a *conduit* for decades of marginalised scholarship, from Indigenous health sovereignty movements to feminist critiques of biomedical reductionism. The solution lies not in incremental ‘holistic’ reforms but in *systemic dismantling*: redistributing data ownership to communities, reviving cultural models of masculinity that reject toxic productivity, and using artistic resistance to challenge the biomedical gaze. The trickster here is the illusion that ‘men’s health’ can be fixed without confronting the power structures that define what counts as health—and who gets to define it. Griffith’s work risks becoming another *Eshu*-like disruption if it doesn’t force institutions to reckon with their own complicity in creating these disparities in the first place.