Engendering Power, Performing Authority: Masculinities, Party Politics, and Power in Fiji

Please note that this is a hybrid event. For online attendance please sign up to obtain the Zoom link. Access link will be delivered via email upon registration.

How are political masculinities constructed, legitimised, contested, and performed within Fijian political parties? This pre-submission seminar presents findings from Romitesh Kant’s doctoral thesis, which examines masculinity as a political formation that structures leadership, authority, and belonging in Fiji’s postcolonial state. Rather than treating masculinity as a background norm, the thesis foregrounds it as a central logic of institutional power and legitimacy.

To explore this, the study develops a four-part conceptual framework: masculinities as political infrastructure, grammar, adaptive legitimacy, and relationality. This framework enables a multi-scalar analysis of how masculinist authority is embedded, enacted, and sometimes unsettled. The research draws on political ethnography informed by feminist and decolonial approaches and is based on a year of fieldwork (2023–2024) involving immersive observation, interviews, and document analysis.

Through case studies of FijiFirst, the Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA), the People’s Alliance, and the National Federation Party, the thesis reveals how militarised, chiefly, technocratic, and redemptive masculinities operate across intersecting lines of race, class, generation, and sexuality. The study contributes to global debates on political masculinities, feminist institutionalism, and postcolonial governance by making visible the gendered logics that scaffold political life in Fiji.

Speaker

Romitesh Kant is a Fiji national and PhD candidate with the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australian National University. His research focuses on political masculinities and the gendered architecture of power in Fijian political institutions. Before joining ANU, Romitesh taught at the University of the South Pacific and worked in policy research across Fiji and the Pacific.