Surfer Girls in the New World Order
Surfing the New World Order is about surfing as both local and global subculture as well as surfing as metaphor for the promises and problems of globalization. It asks: why does the face of the girl, in particular, figure as masthead not just of local/global subcultures but of globalization’s claim to be a force for female liberation and the broader social good? Drawing upon work in cultural studies, feminist sociology, theories of globalization, and an archive of ethnographic research with women surfers in California and Mexico, Comer argues for the practice and concept of “girl localism.” The experience of fighting for waves and respect in male-majority surf breaks, along with fighting for the health and sustainable development of coastal towns and waterways, creates critical political locations related to gender and environment among groups of young women popularly assumed to be lightheaded babes in bikinis. Girl localism protests individualistic ideals of girlhood so crucial to the production of neoliberal subjectivity.
In Part One, “California Goes Global,” Comer tells the improbable tale of surfing’s recent emergence as a multibillion dollar global industry which has redefined subcultural imagery away from its midcentury reputation for bad boy bohemianism and toward twenty-first century Green cosmopolitanism. The first chapter historicizes the subculture’s constitution at midcentury through films, popular novels, and magazines. It argues for surfing as unrecognized site of U.S. alternative postwar masculinities and rebel femininities which – as the subculture expands along routes laid out by Cold War military geographies and late modern tourism, and embraces the dream of “surfing surfari” – become fully implicated in questions of race and colonialism. Chapter Two moves the book to the post-Cold War moment. A new generation of girl-powered surfers, beneficiaries of Title IX and global civil rights and decolonization movements, charge their way to the expanded subcultural professional and commercial opportunities of today. The voice and athletic prowess of third wave feminism provides the backbone of younger women’s resolve, its ethics of female-on-female competition, its critique of and savvy with navigating hetero-sexy global media girlhoods.
Part Two, “Globalization from Below,” spins out, in multi-sited contexts, institutionalized expressions of the subculture – businesses, organizations, foundations, initiatives, which enact “new” new social movement intentions. Chapter Three offers an intergenerational ethnography of Las Olas, a surf camp for women in Sayulita, Mexico. It surveys from transnational perspectives the predicaments and possibilities of Las Olas as an ecofeminist and girl-powered instance of globalization from below. Chapter Four studies two female-focused California surf shops, in Santa Cruz and San Diego, in the larger context of the consolidation, in southern California, of the global surf industry. Both chapters map cross-generational transfers of feminist knowledges about work, play, competition, environmental justice, women’s health, the politics of blondeness, and sexuality. At times they suggest limits about who counts as girls or is imagined within girl localist constituencies. The concluding chapter asks “what’s next” for girl localisms. Taking as originating model the youth outreach work of the late Hawaiian surfer Rell Sunn, and then gesturing away from Makaha toward some hundred places of girl localist presence around the surfing world, the book ends by reflecting on girl localisms under commercial production in Bali, Indonesia, and their links to recent Muslim surf girls seen on Huntington Beach, pictured with boards and “burkinis.” If the logic of girls as commercial masthead of the subculture grows from and reinforces neoliberal regimes of girlhood, ethnographies document girl localist communities in their fights against unhealthy development, against girls’ diminished life chances. They fight for a vision of trans-local connections – across oceans and generations and geopolitical divisions. They don’t care that theirs is a faith in new socialities yet untried.