At the end of 2024, Victoria M. Syddall, the author of the paper I’m sharing here and with whom I had previously collaborated on her work on gender and fisheries, approached me for an interview for a scientific paper she was writing. Her pitch immediately attracted my interest.
This paper took a bold step beyond her work on power and gender imbalance in tuna fisheries, which has driven important reforms, especially in small-scale fisheries
I know… safety gear wasn a thing at the tim…. you can be more, but not less than your fellow crew… particularlly for me as the only part white guy on board
The paper she co-wrote with Karen Fisher, “Exposing multiple masculinities across hierarchies and performance and experience of risk-taking on-board tuna longlining vessels in the WCPO”, investigated something we have long known but rarely articulated in industrial tuna fisheries generally, and in fishing boats specifically: men are not a uniform block of power.
I just read the paper and was pleasantly surprised to see that many aspects of our conversations, many of my direct quotes (under “participant, online” and anyone who knows me will recognise them), and even some blog entries are included in it.
The key issue she brings up, and that I fully endorse, is that masculinity at sea is divided, racialised, contractualised, and deeply shaped by hierarchy. Some men command. Some endure. Some just don’t handle it and leave the fishery, or in a few extreme cases, don’t make it back.
Drawing on empirical research in Fiji’s longline fishery and conversations with people like me, the authors explore how multiple masculinities are performed, negotiated, and policed on board vessels.
They reject the familiar image of the “hard-bodied, risk-taking fisherman” as the universal male archetype. Instead, they reveal a layered world where nationality, rank, contract type, vessel flag, race, and class intersect to determine which men are visible, which are expendable, and which are protected.
At sea, hierarchy is spatial. Your rank determines the amount of space you have, which bunk you sleep in, the workload you have, your exposure to risk, and, of course, your pay.
The captain and engineer — often aligned with the vessel’s ownership nationality or flag state — hold authority. Beneath them sit officers, mates, bosuns, and deckhands, with the lower ranks frequently recruited from Southeast Asian or Pacific Island communities under markedly different contracts. Two men may stand side by side hauling the same line, yet one is paid more, housed better, and treated as belonging, while the other is perhaps more disposable
Masculinity, in this context, is more than just an identity.
The paper frames this through intersectionality — not as an academic flourish, but as an analytical necessity. Risk at sea is not evenly shared. Some men are expected to display physical strength and endurance; others are stereotyped as compliant and low-skilled; still others are burdened by racialised assumptions that influence discipline and surveillance. Masculinity becomes both performance and constraint. It can elevate a man within a hierarchy — or trap him within it.
The authors’ risk framework is especially persuasive. They utilise disaster risk scholarship to conceptualise vulnerability not as weakness but as exposure influenced by thresholds, stressors, pre-existing conditions, and outcomes.
On a tuna longliner, these stressors are constant: long voyages, isolation, hazardous machinery, sleep deprivation, unpredictable weather, market pressure, and hierarchical discipline. However, vulnerability is heightened when these physical risks intersect with unstable contracts, language barriers, withheld wages, or the inability to seek redress.
This is where the paper challenges the dominant gender narrative. The authors argue that much of what has been described as “labour abuse” or “human rights violations” also amounts to gender-based violence of men against men.
Debt bondage, forced labour, physical assault, psychological intimidation, wage withholding, racial humiliation — these are not gender-neutral issues simply because the victims are male. They occur within masculinised spaces, reinforcing norms of dominance, toughness, and a “just deal with it” attitude.
And “just deal with it” is key.
The dominant narrative of masculinity — stoicism, endurance, resilience — conceals vulnerability. A man injured at sea may lose not only his job but also his standing in his village. A crew member who reports abuse risks ostracism or losing his employment. Some deaths are recorded as “fell overboard.” Others remain ambiguously documented. The paper highlights how migrant and low-ranking crew can be highly visible as potential troublemakers, yet invisible when it comes to welfare and protection.
The policy analysis is sobering, and as I have mentioned in my work many times, despite the widespread discourse on human rights within fisheries governance, gender issues remain largely absent from the strong framework of tuna regulation. UNCLOS, the Fish Stocks Agreement, and the FAO Code of Conduct — none of these explicitly address gendered labour dynamics at sea. Even where labour standards exist regionally, they have been slow to become legally binding and even slower to explicitly incorporate gender or Gender-Based Violence considerations.
While the FFA HMTCs and WCPFC Labour CMM have made steady progress on crew labour standards, the gap between resolutions and enforceable measures reveals a structural delay. Meanwhile, masculinised vessel cultures persist within fragmented oversight regimes.
The authors are not suggesting that attention to the “traditional take on gender” should decrease. Instead, they argue that gender equality policy must become relational. If we overlook how masculinities are constructed, rewarded, and punished in fisheries, we end up reproducing the very hierarchies we aim to dismantle.
One of the most notable contributions of the paper is its typology that links hierarchy, risk, resilience, and amplifiers. Crew hierarchy intersects with labour sourcing patterns and vessel flags. Distant-water fleets with long voyages and few port calls are associated with higher forced labour risk indicators. Contract opacity increases economic vulnerability. Cultural narratives about “strong Pacific men” or “cheap Southeast Asian labour” reinforce both exploitation and silence.
Masculinity at sea is therefore neither inherently powerful nor inherently oppressed. It is contingent. A captain’s authority is not the same as a deckhand’s endurance. A racially aligned senior officer may be protected by ownership ties; a migrant crew member may be subjected to both economic and physical coercion.
Importantly, the paper also places these dynamics within social-ecological systems. Tuna fisheries are not just extraction industries; they are embedded in coastal communities where remittances, status, and social expectations circulate. A man’s ability to provide sustains household resilience. When injury, unpaid wages, or disappearance disrupt that flow, vulnerability spreads outward.
There is an uncomfortable clarity here. Tuna fisheries are often discussed in terms of stock assessments, CPUE, and compliance regimes. Yet beneath those metrics are embodied hierarchies. The choreography on deck during fishing —described by my quote
“You need to have your game on; if you fuck up, someone else pays the price. This is because everything is connected and moving. Fishing is the roughest form of ballet; choreography has to be impeccable on board because the consequences are bad, life-threatening if anyone is slacking, the others will let them know real fast”
Fishing depends on disciplined, ranked performances. When one body falters, another absorbs the risk.
And adapting to that structure is not easy for everyone, here again, my words come up:
I think that of the guys I fished with, including myself, are what you call today “on the spectrum” (Autism Spectrum Disorder - ASD), and in my case, also dyslexic, which was seen as dumb, suggesting that, as a big man, I should pursue a career in fishing. And while fisheries have been described quite rightly as a microcosm of society, onboard vessels are a bit different; vessels are small, unique societies comprising socially excluded individuals. In this sense, you can argue that tuna fishing boats are socially inclusive, as they employ men who struggled to find work elsewhere.
The authors conclude that meaningful gender-transformative policy must engage with multiple masculinities. That means recognising migrant men as rights-bearing workers, not just labour inputs. It means integrating gender explicitly into crew welfare measures. It means collecting disaggregated data that goes beyond the binary and beyond token inclusion. It also means confronting the fact that industrial tuna governance has privileged economic efficiency over social equity.
And in that aspect, I really appreciate that Victoria and Karen’s paper neither romanticises nor demonises fishers. It explores our complexities.
And perhaps its most crucial contribution, in tuna fishing across the WCPO, men are neither simple heroes nor uniform oppressors. They are positioned actors within complex systems of power, race, contract, and hierarchy. If fisheries policy continues to treat them as a single, invulnerable group, it will continue to fail to recognise the structural conditions that influence both their exploitation and resilience at sea.
In a sector increasingly scrutinised for human rights abuses, this analysis emphasises that gender is not an afterthought. It is essential to the organisation of labour, risk, and value in the global seafood economy.
And until governance frameworks recognise that… the “choreography” I was quoted with will continue — precise, disciplined, and too often unforgiving.
