Had an excellent time this past weekend at The Stoke Sessions, a critical look into surfing and skateboarding cultures organized by the Surf/Skate Studies Collaborative at San Diego State University.
I presented a personal research project “Girls Who Can’t Surf Good’: Gender, Age, and Access to Surfing Facilitated by Social Media.” This combines a bit of autotheory with survey research, inspired by my multiple attempts to become a surfer, dating back to when I was 12-13, before I was finally able to call myself a surfer at age 41. This was largely facilitated, for me, by access to online fora where femme and gender non-conforming surfers could share knowledge and socialize without having to rely on on surfing’s historically white cis-male and agressively gatekept culture. I was curious about how common my experience was, and wanted to put some data behind what I suspected was a lost generation of surfers who, like me, were unable to access the sport for decades.
Slides
Abstract
This research began as autoethnography: I’m a cis woman, an older surfer in my 40s, who began as an adult, despite having heard more than once variations on William Finnegan’s dictum from Barbarian Days (2015): “People who tried to start at an advanced age, meaning over fourteen, had, in my experience, almost no chance of
becoming proficient, and usually suffered pain and sorrow before they quit.” I had
wanted to learn, however, from the time I was under Finnegan’s arbitrary age cut-off,
but had no access facilitated by a male relative, friend, or partner, and knew of no
women in my coastal community who surfed. Neither was I aware of lessons offered in that pre-Internet era. As an adult, I learned to surf in fits and starts—navigating surfing’s broadly chauvinistic culture—until I discovered online fora of women-identified surfers pooling resources and knowledge on MeetUp, Facebook Groups, Reddit, and other platforms. Within these groups, I heard many stories that were much like mine. Using recent theory on surfing, gender, orientation, and access, I analyze a set of surveys and interviews with members of these groups, and consider their encounters with gender- and age-based gatekeeping, on the beach, in the water, and online. I argue that that lineups have been reconfigured—particularly in the past decade, and particularly for older surfers—through social-media channels for femme, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming surfers, in ways that go beyond simple “see it, be it” media representation, and which are paralleled by the movements for pay equity and inclusion at the highest levels of competitive surfing. These spaces, however, are not untroubled by essentialist questions of “womanhood” and subject to their own forms of genderpolicing, as evidenced by recent arguments over the WSL’s new trans-inclusive competition guidelines.
Kristin M. Miller 