What leisure? Surfeminism in an era of Trump

Abstract

Powerful new feminisms are challenging the rise of the Global Right through mass mobilization, demands for accountability, and innovative opposition, such as #MeToo, the Global Women’s Marches, and #Feminism4the99. The international forum Signs: A Journal of Women and Culture has urged feminist scholars to meet the moment by bridging academic and larger feminist publics and attending to creative, new feminist movements. This paper showcases one such example, surfeminism, a theory and action project working between publics of academia and global surfing. Surfeminism is a worldwide network connecting people, ideas, particular coastal geographies, online and real-time communities and microeconomies in surf industry, with activisms focused on protests of sexism in surf media, access to ocean spaces, environmental health, and women’s racial, economic, and reproductive justice. The paper lays out surfeminist publics through discussion of the Institute for Women Surfers (IWS), a public humanities project in grassroots political education emphasizing relationships, cross-geography alliances, and critical thought. One of the more important and complex claims of surfeminism is for women and girls’ leisure as a feminist political need. A discussion of leisure and its relation to authoritarianisms, as well as ideologies of so-called postfeminism closes the paper.

Activist Surfing-based Groups in the Tourism Transition: Localism and Universalism in the French Basque Country

“…That is to say that not only surfers managed to gather emotional communities, but they also rallied politically motivated citizens. This fact expands research demonstrating that a subcategory of surfers mobilizes public opinion in support of universal causes, including women's equality (Comer, 2010(Comer, , 2019Schumacher, 2017), race (Walker, 2011, and the reintegration of minorities into society (Morgan, 2010).…”

Thinking with/in surfing: Podcasting as public pedagogy and scholarship in/for the global South

“…In making surfing both the subject and object of study in the oceanic South, critical surf studies have contributed to both hydrocolonialism literature, in studies of surfing, culture, and politics in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa (Samuelson, 2014;Thompson, 2014), and hydrofeminist literature, by studying surfing as a space for activism against sexist, racist, homo/transphobic, and ableist sporting practices (Graaff, in press). Hydrofeminism also swims with critical surf studies from the North, in Krista Comer's (2019) and Cori Schumacher's (2017) theorising of the term surfeminism for scholarship and activism, which draws on feminist and queer studies of surfing (Comer, 2010;Comley, 2016;Knijnik, et al, 2010;lisahunter, 2017;Olive, 2019;Roy, 2013). As Comer notes, Surfeminism thus names a thinking project in which feminism is a theory of power relating to women, girls, heteronormative sexuality, and sport, as well as indispensable in critical analyses of global political economies and surfing's dominant political ideals of freedom.…”

Decolonizing surf tourism: alternatives to development, surfer subjectivity, and surfscape commons governance

“…Surfscapes in the field study country of Costa Rica are no exception, where "patriocolonial" constructs (lisahunter, 2016) and neoliberal governance/governmentality in surf tourism destinations (Ruttenberg & Brosius, 2017 are differently experienced by surfers of varying genders, ethnicities, nationalities and social status. Given the ways women surfer-researchers subjectively negotiate these entrenched power dynamics across axes of gender, race and class, along with the implicated biases these common encounters might produce in our research, reflexivity provides a useful means of exploring subjectivity in surfing tourism research from the lenses of decoloniality and feminism, as other researchers have also contended (Olive, 2015(Olive, , 2019(Olive, , 2020Ingersoll, 2016;Olive et al, 2018;Comer, 2019).…”

“…Chapter II synthesized literature on the potential for (r)evolutionary postcapitalist surfer subjectivities to "surf beyond postmodernity" through postwork imaginaries (Comer, 2017), refusal of work (Lawler, 2017), resistance to industry overdevelopment (Hough-Snee & Eastman, 2017b;Walker, 2011), and intersectional activism across axes/issues of gender, race, class, coloniality, and environmentalism in surfing culture (Comer, 2017(Comer, , 2019. The anti-essentialist analysis of these surfer subjectivities posited that they may represent a counterhegemonic politics resisting and reconstituting power as modes of "making" (and surfing) "a world" (Gibson-Graham & Roelvink, 2010) different from the "state of modern surfing".…”