POLITICS AND IT'S MAL[E]CONTENTS: Masculine Architectures of Power in Fiji's Political Parties

Abstract

This thesis investigates how political masculinities are produced, sustained, and contested within Fiji's multi-ethnic, postcolonial state. Drawing on extended political ethnography and over 200 interviews conducted between 2023 and 2024, it examines the gendered infrastructures of political parties, rituals of authority, and affective performances that underpin leadership and legitimacy. Rather than treating masculinity as an identity category or personal trait, the thesis conceptualises it as a political infrastructure, embedded in institutions, encoded in everyday practice, and responsive to shifts in power. Set against a backdrop of colonial legacies, military coups, and democratic transitions, the thesis explores how masculinities operate within and across four political parties: FijiFirst, SODELPA, the People's Alliance Party (PAP), and the National Federation Party (NFP). It argues that while these parties vary in ideology and structure, from militarised civic nationalism to vanua-based ethno-nationalism and technocratic multiculturalism, all reproduce masculinised grammars of political legitimacy. These grammars shape who is recognised as a leader, whose voices are amplified, and whose authority is assumed rather than earned. Theoretically, the study is anchored in political masculinities, feminist institutionalism, intersectionality, and decolonial theory. It explains how masculinities are performed and institutionalised across party meetings, leadership contests, campaign rallies, and everyday political life. Methodologically, it blends immersive fieldwork with a Pacific ethic of relationality, attending to both visible authority and the micro-practice, rituals, silences, spatial hierarchies through which gendered power circulates. Key findings reveal that political masculinities in Fiji are relational and adaptive: they shift in response to generational, ethnic, and institutional pressures while maintaining patriarchal control. FijiFirst exemplifies a technocratic and authoritarian masculinity anchored in control and discipline; SODELPA performs chiefly and Christian masculinities tied to vanua and Indigenous legitimacy; PAP constructs a redemptive masculinity around its leader's narrative of transformation; while the NFP projects professional, moderate masculinities that stabilise Indo-Fijian political authority while marginalising women and younger members. Across all cases, women's leadership remains symbolically included but structurally peripheral, and non-conforming masculinities are policed through moral and procedural scripts. This thesis makes three central contributions: it repositions masculinity as a core analytic for understanding state power in the Pacific; it develops the concepts of political masculinity as infrastructure, grammar, and adaptive legitimacy; and it provides an ethnographically rich, theoretically grounded account of gendered political life in Fiji. Ultimately, it argues that gender is the hidden grammar of power in Fijian politics, enduring, patterned, and contested, but not immutable. Show more