Masculinity as Infrastructure and Grammar: Relational Political Masculinities in Fijian Party Life

This paper theorises political masculinity as both infrastructure and grammar to explain how authority is organised, authorised, and felt within party politics in Fiji. Infrastructure captures the formal, institutionalised architectures of power—rules, hierarchies, and procedures—while grammar denotes the unwritten, affective, and performative norms through which legitimacy is enacted in everyday political life. Building on long‑term political ethnography and feminist institutionalism, I show how masculine authority is reproduced through ritualised deference, spatial ordering, turn‑taking, and affective policing in key party sites such as Annual General Meetings and candidate selection processes. These practices privilege seniority, stoicism, and moral guardianship, converting “political time” and decorum into tacit benchmarks that disproportionately advantage senior male actors while containing women’s inclusion within symbolic roles. Analytically, the paper specifies how discursive markers (e.g., appeals to protection, fatherhood, and vanua) and embodied repertoires (voice, pacing, strategic humility) together stabilise masculine legitimacy, even amid institutional change. Empirically, the analysis draws on ethnographic observations, participant interactions, and documentary materials to trace how alliances, loyalty, and dissent are managed as relational masculinities that adapt to generational and organisational pressures. The paper contributes to the emergent field of political masculinities by grounding structural and relational theorisation in Pacific party politics, clarifying the distinction between institutional infrastructure and everyday grammar, and demonstrating how “contained inclusion” sustains gendered orders without overtly exclusionary rules. The argument advances intersectional, decolonial understandings of how men’s practices shape political possibility beyond formal representation metrics.