books
feminist surf life in the age of climate change
In Progress
Feminist Surf Life does not try to figure out better climate science or better missions to conserve revered waves or remediate coastal zones. Instead, it focuses on how to imagine relationships that will see us through the worst that is coming and still believe the water calls.
Forwarding both the knowledges and social life that emerged through the Institute for Women Surfers (IWS), Feminist Surf Life tells a story about how women came together across global geographies, and are still coming together, to change themselves, one another, and their waterworlds for the better. Their stories and actions define “environmentalism” as not only an end to new oil drilling and transition to clean energy, but as fights against beaches as spaces of whiteness and masculine settler localism, advocacy for women’s livelihoods, respect for intergenerational legacies and custodianship, and as taking leadership from new sources. This project offers a theory of relationality necessary for facing the inevitable changes to surf culture’s traditional notions of community, well-being, and sense of place. It’s a theory for anyone, not only surfers, looking for pathways to feminist climate justice.
living west as feminists:
conversations about the where of us
In the aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Krista Comer invited fifteen colleagues into a conversation about feminism and the U.S. West. From her travels over some thirteen thousand miles to places chosen by participants comes a remarkable series of dialogues focusing on questions about the where of us—the places that we love or belong, or don’t belong, and who we are in them.
Living West as Feminists moves from travelogue to interviews to critical meditations. It asks who one’s people are, to whom one feels accountable, and how we might make peace with the itinerant, often displaced lives of late-stage capitalist culture. Ultimately, the book understands feminism not as a specific politics or set of theories but as a network of relations. Its coalitional perspective allows for coming together even while distinguishing feminists who write from Black, Indigenous, queer, Chicanx, and materialist perspectives. Feminist rest areas, in which relational securities find footing, can create the most priceless resource in desperate times: well-being and political hope.
2024 - university of nebraska press
surfer girls in the new world order
In a groundbreaking work that has become a mixed-methods model for the field of Critical Surf Studies, Comer’s Surfer Girls in the New World Order asks: Of all the metaphors, how is it that the rhetoric of surfing, across world languages, catches on in the 1990s to describe users’ relations to new media? What does surfing have to do with new technologies and hypermobile forms of capital and labor that characterize economies of late capitalism? Of what significance is the new “female-friendly” public face of surfing given its notoriety for sexism, hostility to women in the water, and lad magazines featuring babes in bikinis?
Distinguishing the subculture of the 1960s from today’s, Surfer Girls argues the billion-dollar macroeconomies of recent times are a case study in globalization. Drawing on theories of globalization, Comer tracks the subculture’s exponential growth and export to far-flung new markets from ground zero in the US and Australia. What’s traveling with it? The neoliberal ideas of individual pleasure and movement as themselves definitions of freedom, surfing being the embodiment quintessential. Crucial to the production of expanded markets is the growth of girl and women consumers and female-oriented products and the simultaneous travel of ideals of “empowered” Western-world womanhood to new, frequently non-Western destinations where goods are sold.
To pursue these trajectories, Comer puts women and girl surfers at the center of the subculture’s political economy, bringing oral history and multi-sited ethnography together with the social life of surf shops and international women’s surf camps. She explores subcultural cinema and media by way of histories of women, masculinity, and feminism at mid-twentieth century. The book’s cast of characters includes international instructors, photographers and filmmakers, big wave surfers, surfing mothers, elected officials, business owners, and ecoactivists. Surfer Girls develops foundational concepts of “the politics of blondeness,” “related locals,” and especially “girl localism” which signals that the experience of fighting for waves and respect in male-majority surf breaks, along with advocating for the health and sustainable development of coastal towns and waterways, has politicized surfer girls around the world.
2010 - Duke university press
landscapes of the new west: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women's Writing
In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women’s movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers.
Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more “feminine,” postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itself — especially that cherished symbol of western “authenticity,” open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today’s American West.