Politics, Bodies, Surf Girls: Photos and Story.
A collaboration with photographer Elizabeth Pepin.

In its early stages, this project is a collaborative work between the filmmaker and surf photographer Elizabeth Pepin and myself as a scholar/writer.  Our vision for it was inspired by the book, Girl Culture (Lauren Greenfield).  Girl Culture features a variety of photographs of girls and their complicated relationships to their bodies and to popular culture. Also an international exhibition touring major art houses in 2002, the photos were widely praised in feminist media as critical interventions into the hyper-sexed norms of media representations of teenage girls in the Western world. Accompanying text by Joan Brumberg, “The Body Project” narrated the world of the photos.

Girl Culture motivated Pepin and me to think about producing a collection of images and stories that tell a very different tale about girls’ bodies and politics than the tale which dominates what one sees all over the multibillion dollar global surf media.  Running counter to the sexy babe in bikini version of young womanhood which sells products and fuels the profits of the surf industry, our interest in this project is to visualize other forms of beauty and global purpose.  Surfing is not simply a sport or a “lifestyle.”  Neither is women’s relation to surfing simply about selling or buying products.  Surfing is a way of being in the world; an orientation.  For women and girls, surfing offers a powerful way of inhabiting the female body and of knowing oneself in relation to local and global ocean contexts. Our interests then are to represent what we see in the transnational surf scenes we know well. We emphasize girls’ bodies as sites of physical power, the aesthetics of human and nonhuman contact in surf environments, and the urgency of scenes of transnational social change.

Shooting and writing for the project are in the development and planning phase.