Beyond performance: the structural production of maritime masculinities

Abstract Research on maritime masculinities has generated important insights into how gender shapes identity, occupational culture, and workplace practice at sea. This paper builds on that scholarship by asking a complementary question: what does masculine conduct help to sustain within the organisation of maritime labour? Drawing on Connell’s relational account of masculinity, Fraser’s theory of capitalism as organised through constitutive boundary struggles, and feminist social reproduction theory, it develops the concept of masculinities as boundary practices: forms of conduct through which the divisions organising maritime capitalism are reproduced in everyday life. The analysis examines four such divisions: between production and social reproduction, exploitation and expropriation, economy and nature, and public and private authority. Across fisheries, maritime aquaculture, and global shipping, masculine norms such as endurance, stoicism, discipline, and provider obligation are formed within the demands of maritime work and historically embedded social relations, and then taken up and rewarded by gendered, racialised, and class-stratified labour arrangements that distribute risk, authority, recognition, and responsibility unevenly. In doing so, they help render those arrangements workable and legitimate. These processes are structured through gender as a structural relation constituted through race, class, nationality, and colonial history. The paper argues that transforming maritime gender relations requires changes to the institutional organisation of maritime labour and proposes boundary practices as a framework for connecting studies of maritime masculinities to the political economy of the sea.