Category: gender

Gender, Sex and Competitive Surfing in South Africa – comparing the late 1970s and early 1990s

~ Glen Thompson

I have a chapter published in a study that focuses on how sex/es, gender/s and sexuality/ies have shaped and re-shape surfing culture. The book, edited by lisahunter, is Surfing, Sex, Genders and Sexualities, (London and New York: Routledge, 2018), covers surfing’s pasts and its present. My historical lisahunte coverchapter is titled: “A tale of two surf contests: Gender, sex and competitive surfing in South Africa during the late 1970s and early 1990s.”

In summary, the chapter historicises two surf contests as formative moments in South African amateur surfing during apartheid and as South Africa began its transition to a democracy. The 1978 South African Surfing Championships illustrated the consolidation of surfing’s patriocolonial whiteness at a time when local amateur surfing was under pressure from the international boycott of apartheid sport and the ascendancy of professional surfing. The 1992 Wella for Women’s Surfing Contest was the first women’s only surf event in the country and foregrounded the representation and the ongoing struggle for recognition of female white surfers within a male dominated sporting arena as South Africa transitioned towards democracy and global surf brands began commercialising women’s surfing. These surf contests open up how political and socio-cultural events shaped surfing, how patriarchy was produced within local organised surfing, and how the intersectionality of gender, sex, and race is crucial in tracing the changing social construction of competitive surfing identities in South Africa.

As set out in the overview of book, Surfing, Sex, Genders and Sexualities “crosses new theoretical, empirical and methodological boundaries by exploring themes and issues such as indigenous histories, exploitation, the marginalized, race, ethnicity, disability, counter cultures, transgressions and queering. Offering original insights into surfing’s symbolism, postcolonialism, patriocolonial whiteness and heteronormativity, its chapters are connected by a collective aspiration to document sex/es, gender/s and sexuality/ies as they are shaped by surfing and, importantly, as they re-shape the many, possibly previously unknown, worlds of surfing”

lisahunter’s introduction to the book outlines this field of study and points to future directions in scholar-activist engagements in and with surf culture. The introduction is available here – click on “preview PDF”.

 

Race, Gender, Politics and Transnationalism in the Making of Surfing’s Sixties in South Africa

~ Glen Thompson
In a chapter titled “Pushing under the Whitewash: Revisiting the Making of South Africa’s Surfing Sixties” in Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman (eds), The Critical Surf Studies Reader, (Durham: Duke University  Press, 2017), I explores the making of the South African surfing lifestyle in Sixties.
CSSR_cover_front copia
The chapter historicizes how surfing in South Africa was raced, gendered and shaped by transnational surf culture. The socio-cultural determinations of racial exclusion and male privilege are examined through the intersectionality of a tanned whiteness fashioned through beach apartheid, lifestyle consumption and an imported “California dreaming.” In revisiting South African surfing’s emergence in the years from 1959 to 1968, this chapter seeks to push under the whitewash of that period and point to the persistence in the present of South African surfing’s founding mythologies.
From book’s blurb – “The Critical Surf Studies Reader brings together eighteen interdisciplinary essays that explore surfing’s history and development as a practice embedded in complex and sometimes oppositional social, political, economic, and cultural relations. Refocusing the history and culture of surfing, this volume pays particular attention to reclaiming the roles that women, indigenous peoples, and people of color have played in surfing.”
The introduction to the volume by Hough-Snee and Eastman, which provides a historiographic overview of surfing studies, can be downloaded here.

Review Essay: Surfing and Swimming Histories in the Radical History Review

~ Glen Thompson

My review essay “Disturbed Waters: New Currents in the History of Water Sport,” Radical History Review 125, (May 2016) appeared in a special issue of the journal edited by Peter Alegi and Brenda Elsey, focusing on the theme of “Historicizing the Politics and Pleasure of Sport”.

I review studies on swimming and surfing history which open up new perspectives on the relationship between politics, culture, and gender. The books under review are:RHR_125_cover.png

  • Lisa Bier, Fighting the Current: The Rise of American Women’s Swimming, 1870 – 1926, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011).
  • Scott Laderman, Empire in Waves: A Political History of Surfing, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).
  • Isaiah Helekunihi Walker, Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth-Century Hawai‘i, (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2011).

These water sports can be seen historically as political and determined by local, national, and global conditions. Each study historicizes the politics of aquatic pleasure. Bier’s Fighting the Current foregrounds American women’s swimming challenge to the social order. Walker’s Waves of Resistance looks to the contested nature of the surf zone in reclaiming Hawaiian surfing “traditions” and masculinities marginalized by Western cultural appropriation. Laderman’s Empire in Waves documents the Americanization of surfing, how it expanded globally as a politically ambiguous cultural practice, and carried with it the seeds of US imperialism.

Alegi and Elsey’s introduction to this sports history issue of the journal can be downloaded from here.

 

 

Sport, Lifestyle and Changing Femininities in South African Surfing Culture

~ Glen Thompson ~ Leave a comment

I presented a research in progress paper entitled “From Femlins to Saltwater Girls: Sport, Lifestyle and Femininities in South African Surfing Culture, c.1965 to the present” at the Stellenbosch History Department Seminar Series on Wednesday, 24 April 2013. This paper was then presented on Saturday, 29 June 2013 at the 2013 Southern African Historical Society Conference held in Gaborone, Botswana. This working paper forms part of my doctoral study on gender and politics in the history of South African surfing culture.

A further iteration of this paper was presented at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape on Thursday, 28 August 2014. This work in progress paper was titled: “From Femlins to Saltwater Girls: Surfer Girls and Lifestyle Sport Consumption in South African surfing magazines, 1965 – present.”

Summary of the paper

Liquid Girls Surfing magazine, cover of March 2006 issue.
Liquid Girls Surfing Magazine, cover of March 2006 issue.

This paper seeks to make visible the histories of women’s surfing in South Africa as a counterpoint to the persistent discourse that the sport of surfing is a male activity. It attempts a pro-feminist, new cultural history reading of the surfing archive taking into consideration both textual and visual sources to recover the representations, voices, experiences and agency of girls and women who surfed or continue to surf in Cape Town, Durban or elsewhere along the South African coastline from the mid-1960s to the present. This paper seeks to document how South African surfing femininities negotiated complicity within the gender order or, through a surfing identity, challenged the gendered nature of power in society and within surfing culture itself. It explores both the local and global iterations of surfing femininities as shaped by or shaping cultural, social and commercial processes. In particular, the role of surf magazine advertising is examined for how it maintained a youthful, sexy, athletic yet objectified heterosexual image of the “surfer girl” over several decades. In locating this study within the study of hegemonic femininities in southern Africa this paper explores the complexities of gender relations in the social construction of femininities: how these femininities were themselves historically contingent, fluid and contested by girls and women who surfed, constructed in relation to men in the surf and on the beach, located in relation to a discourse of a femininised ocean, and socially differentiated based on the culture of beach leisure and access to leisure time, sporting prowess, the nature of sportisation through organised sport, and the consumptive ethic of a beauty culture associated with the emergence and consolidation of surfwear as mainstream fashion. In short, in reflecting on the role of gender and lifestyle in South African surfing history, the conditions for the emergence in South Africa in the 1990s of the global phenomenon of the “Surfer Girl”, with its Californian and Australian roots, is considered within the context of the democractisation of South African society. Yet, this history also illustrates some of the limits of social and cultural change at the beach as women’s surfing in South Africa has largely remained a white sporting activity, despite the promise of change in the prominent roles of black girl surfers in the Hollywood DVD Blue Crush 2 (2011), set in KwaZulu-Natal and the eastern coastline, and the locally produced Amaza (2013) television series filmed in Muizenberg, Cape Town.

Transforming Surfer Boys in the New South Africa

~ Glen Thompson ~ Leave a comment

I presenting a paper on how black surfers have been represented in South Africa’s surfing print magazines since 1990 at the Work/Force: South African Masculinities in the Media Conference  held at Stellenbosch University on 13th & 14th September 2012.

Summary of the paper
The idea of the “surfer boy” in the South African surfing imaginary is no longer primarily white, male and youthful although Zigzag (since 1976) and thebombsurf (since 2008) surf magazines continue to maintain that white, heterosexual hegemony within their textual and visual representations supported by surf industry advertising expenditure. Nor is surfing nostalgically looking back to the halcyon days of the Californian inspired Sixties and Seventies. Rather, through grassroots initiatives, surfing development programmes linked to organised surfing, and pressure from the national sport ministry, that same surf media and several surf movies are constructing the idea of surfing in Mzansi (the South) at established and emergent surfing centres along the South African coastline, such as at Durban, Mzumbe, Port St Johns Jeffreys Bay and Muizenberg, where black male surfers and white girl surfers are visible. In many ways it is the new possibility of these postcolonial surfing sites that have provided the greatest challenge to the historically white and male South African surfing imaginary and opens up possibilities for new male identities and gender relations on the post-apartheid beach and, through sporting and recreational practices, in the surf. This does not mean that the surf media is not without producing social tensions in what is said and not said (and what is seen and unseen) about race and gender. The former surfaces as race trouble in negotiating new identities that attempt to masked social fractures within surf culture. The latter shows fissures in the production of a white South African surfing masculinity historically used to supporting its dominance in society through a sporting practice. In these ways, the South African surf media provides a useful lens to critically explore competing masculinities within a marginal aquatic sporting tradition that point to social transformations on the beach in the years after apartheid.

For more information on the conference: Work/Force: South African Masculinities in the Media Conference.

This paper is part of my ongoing work for my doctoral studies focusing on gender and politics in the history of South African surfing culture.

Surf Blink, toward a theory of wave selection in a contest

~ Glen Thompson ~ Leave a comment
One of my waves. Photo by Ben Day

A posting on making snap judgments about selecting waves (i.e.  a surf blink) while competing in a SUP surfing contest which prompts ponderings on research methods and the history of the surfing’s present.

It’s Easter long weekend and I ended up doing embedded research on the SUP scene up in Plettenberg Bay in the Southern Cape and taking time out from thesis writing on South African surfing and the Sixties which will go toward a paper on the “Californication” of South African surfing culture for a forthcoming history conference. This is not a posting about those themes; rather I’m in search of methods for thinking about the past in the present and how to translate subjective experiences while surfing waves into a phenomenology of social acts which emerge from a consciousness of being in the surf. Put simply, why did I chose that wave rather than another during a SUP surfing heat which just happened to take place at Lookout Beach in Plettenberg Bay.

Mindful of the switch between historian and playing part of the making of a new sport of stand-up paddle boarding (called SUP) in the country, I was a participant observer to the inaugural Off The Hoek SUP Classic, a contest with lagoon and sea paddle races and a wave-riding event. For my surf journalistic take on the event, and visual evidence of the happenings over 22nd  to 23rd April 2011, read my article on SUPHQ.com, a locally based web portal for SUP community. This frames some context for what follows.

On route to the contest, driving my board laden car, I was listening to Malcolm Galdwell’s audio book version of his 2005 book, Blink. The book is about rapid cognition and covers examples from knowing from a glance when a ancient statue is a fake to making snap decisions about a person, a couple or a situation. It is about how we “thin-slice” encounters and contexts, a psychological process whereby a person uses limited amounts of information to seemingly use intuition (which developed as experience or expertise) to make sense of something or someone.

I was intrigued: how would Gladwell’s ideas translate into a situation that I was most familiar with – such as selecting waves when surfing in a contest or, for that matter, wave-selection when free surfing outside of the contest rules of an event, as the one does inform the other through the skill gained through hours of spending time surfing and “reading” waves – what I’ll call “surf blink”.

Surf blink is informed by three things: an understanding of one’s board and body in the waves. Spending time on one or more different types of boards (for example, bodyboard, shortboard, longboard or SUP) also plays a role in what surfing proficiency is developed, as each board type is designed to allow for differing wave-riding experiences and styles across a range of surf conditions. The surfing act then could be defined as a process of embodiment, the experience by which a living female or male body dances on a wave mediated by the technology of a board (and in the case of a SUP, a paddle is included in the act of the glide).

Taken together then, the following factors play a part in wave-selection: board type, proficiency as a surfer (which may be determined by age and agility), and surf conditions. In a contest environment there are several other considerations: time (how long is the heat – usually 20 minutes in the initial rounds, and 30 minutes for a final), contenders (how many other competitors are in the heat with you), the judges’ gaze (the objective and subjective criteria used to judge your surfing against the other surfers in the heat), the shouts and clapping of spectators on the beach, and how the surf media represents the event in narratives published online or in print as story, photograph or video. Add “contest nerves” and adrenalin into the mix and you get a charged psychological moment that closes in on one’s personal performance in the waves. These factors would generally apply to a world-title contender and a novice to the contest scene (although their expectations and experiences of a heat would be vastly different).

These considerations start to engage with a discussion of the “surfing body-self” and non-representational theory pertaining to peak experiences in Nick Ford and David Brown’s Surfing and Social Theory (2006) – a seminal reader in locating surfing studies within academic practices of knowledge production. Ford and Brown’s points in Chapters 6 and 7 direct me to consider “surf blink” further as “kinaesthetic performance” and “expanded awareness” that enables a surfer to act through “non-cognitive dimensions of embodiment”. Here the interest is in surfing as experience and how the surfing body acts, not as set of signs representing social or cultural dimensions. In looking to research embodied practices in surfing, I am steering toward the idea that the instinct of riding a wave is learned bodily skills performed on the canvas of a wave (yet these skills have been developed in social and historical contexts). So too, if this non-cognitive surf blink applies to surfing the wave (making snap judgements of what move to perform), then it should also apply to wave-selection as a the precursor to anticipating the dream glide.

But this is the realm of social theory rather than historical studies. Maybe I should start to consider a surf contest heat as a ritual of non-cognitive embodiment. This ritualised space is the commodification of surfing’s transcendent experience and what can best be told as a history of the outcomes of one surfing body against another. I still feel there is something missing here. That is part of my quandary with surfing studies: my own practices in the present may cloud my understanding of surfing’s past – especially when it comes to thinking of surfing experiences in the waves over time. How then to write a history of surfing stoke in relation to politics, society and culture? This question may find some answers in where my interest in the historical and psycho-social dynamics of surf contests began?

Before embarking on my doctoral studies I had started studying the institutional contexts of power in which of surf contents, as part of organised surfing culture, were gendered as masculine. In one study, “Judging Surf Culture” published in the Journal of Natal and Zulu History, I focused on the judges’ gaze and the criteria for defining good surfing as part of a process of creating a hegemonic surfing masculinity during the first South African surfing championships held in Durban in July 1966 – which was a founding moment in the making of competitive surfing in South Africa. In another study, in Rob Morrell’s Changing Men in Southern Africa (2001), I provided a social contest for the emergence of professional surfing in South Africa as a white, male sport.

A back story to these studies was my antipathy for surf contests during the 1980s and 1990s. This stance had developed during my school years as a grom surfing along Durban’s beachfront as my initial thoughts of surfing stardom faded through middling showings during school inter-house surf contests and an attempt at a Natal development contest in the late 1980s. This was informed by a further desire simply to surf unfettered by any constraint – possibly why I made the following statement in my final year at high school in an English oral: “It is in this watery playground that I have found a place to escape from all the tensions of everyday life.” Leaving the question aside of what those everyday tensions were for another thesis chapter, my surfing experiences into my twenties tended toward that of a soul surfer rather than the competitive in so far that I even stopped reading Zigzag surf magazine and preferred the short run of African Soul Surfer, took little interest in news of the world titles, and avoided watching the annual world professional surfing contests held in Durban and Jeffreys Bay.

Disengaged from organised surfing at an aesthetic level, I entered into a study of South African surfing’s history where most of the records available were (and still remain so) on surfing contests and the surfers who gained recognition in that arena. I was interested in the silences, the histories between the surf contests, the history of surfing’s everyday in South Africa marred by beach apartheid and how gender relations were shaped within surf culture. These themes continue to inform my research although I started from what knowledge was available in the “surf archive” and I am now slowly filling in the gaps through my current research programme.

Since starting on my doctoral research in 2009 I have also plunged myself into surf contests – longboard and SUP surf events at regional and national levels as well as one local event where I entered three divisions: SUP, longboard and retro. In the former two the boards are over 9 feet in length, while the retro was on 5’8″ Fish twin-shape from a 1970s template. In all, I’ve surprised myself with my placings at these events, which have at times has been a top three or four placing in a board category or age division. Mostly I would say I am erratic in surf contests – winning a first round heat and then dropping out in the next. That is embodied performance based on results which ,in their own way, enter the annuals of surfing’s records.

Part of me qualifies this as embedded research in surf culture, another part has come to enjoy the thrill of being judged on surfing performance within a heat to gauge my level of proficiency in the sport of surfing. In many ways, I am now on the receiving end of the judges’ gaze that I was so critical about in my paper on “Judging Surf Culture”. I have moved from seeking to understand surfing as representation to thinking and acting within surfing in a more non-representational (embodied) manner. The challenge to see how to bring the two back into an historical perspective.

One way that non-representational practices and experiences could be historicised in riding surfboards that emerged from earlier eras of surfing’s history; such as a longboard or SUP – albeit these shapes have become influenced by modern materials and aesthetics, so the “pure” essence of the board is lost. Nevertheless, there is a kind of historical memory located in these boards which is remembered in films like The Endless Summer (1964) or photographs that are displayed of surfing’s Golden Years. I have also taken up the practice of riding boards shaped for prior generations of surfers to attempt to get a feel of how one’s surfing must change in relation to how the board fits with the wave and what manoeuvres one can do. A question I ask myself here is: am I seeking nostalgically for a surfing past that is different to my present? Or do these old designs help me imagine the past as I write South African surfing’s history?

Yet I have digressed, well not exactly. Surf blink has a personal history for each surfer; the above are some of mine which came into play during the SUP surfing contest during the Off The Hoek Classic in Plettenberg Bay. I recall the twenty minute first heat going passed at a steady pace – I was surfing against five others in my peer-group. I too up a position at backline, facing my SUP out to sea and waited for waves to come to me. The one thing with a SUP is that you can see what swell is coming more easily than from the lower vantage point of a prone paddling surfboard. Also, on a SUP you can cover more distance than on a surfboard to an approaching wave due to the advantage of a paddle. I usually like to take a wave soon after the heat starts so as to get rid of any contest nerves and take a psychological lead in knowing that I was one wave up on the others in the rotation of getting back out to backline after the wave. This time I received a beating from a set that broke further out than usual, so I was in catch-up mode for the remainder of the heat against contenders, some of whom have beaten me during previous surf events. I saw them catching great rides. But I took off on five or six waves; and felt surfed then well in getting moves in and a length of ride. Most of these waves were the set waves, the bigger ones. Even during the dying moments of the heat, with five minutes and less to spare, I still waited and let smaller waves go by before selecting the wave I wanted. My overall sense was that in that heat I was calm, having fun, and was making turns on the waves with less effort than usual, despite riding a new Naish Hokau 9’0″ SUP, with less volume and length than my other board. In short, I felt confident and the results showed it; by very narrow scores, two of the three judges placed me first over Gary Van Rooyen.

In my next heat I came unglued and took a fourth placing, and so missed the opportunity to go through to the final round. The primary difference in this heat was that I had to swim for my board after the leash came undone (or rather I had not tied it to the board properly before paddling out). This threw me off; the swim was long,  I lost time and felt physically exhausted. In trying to catch-up I made selected waves that were not the best in just trying to get my wave count up. In that rush I fell off a wave and then misjudged the arrival of a set before the end of the heat. I had entered the heat with high expectations and washed back in with those hopes dashed. That is the nature of a heat – it can go your way or not. In this second heat, after the swim, I felt frustrated and rushed and out of rhythm; in stark contrast to the first heat despite only an hour or so separating them.

So, what does this mean for an understanding of surf blink in a contest?  I know that my best contest strategy is to look for the set (the biggest) wave available, and am prepared to wait for this wave. I am aware that I have some proficiency on the wave but I am not a surf or SUP champion. I rely on my wave selection to boost my placing in the judges’ eyes during a heat. If I take the biggest wave and surf it well enough, in relation to the other surfers in the water during the heat, I will advance to the next round. And sometimes it is not winning the heat that matters in advancing, getting a second place in a heat also puts you into the next round – aiming for first is not always a good psychological advantage if you place more pressure on yourself to perform better, or on par, in a next heat after winning the previous one. Of course, once you have demonstrated a placing into the next heat, then the crowd on the beach is watching you more intently with expectations of your advancing to the next round, dependent on who is in your heat. These psycho-social factors play there part with the rapid cognition of wave selection during a heat. In that contest space, I am fully aware of the moment in the surf, what my competitors are doing, the judges’ gaze, the need to perform well, the crowd watching, and the adrenal rush. I am also aware that things have slowed down. A ride on a wave is maybe 20 seconds on average but it rushes by in screen grabs of turns off the bottom and the top of the wave.

Then when back at backline in the take off zone, waiting for the next wave, I am shifting my vision from the horizon to where are my competitors sitting. I am looking for that spot where the next swell will rise up out of the depths and offer a dream glide. I am imagining it coming but not what I will perform on it. I wait. I have a sense of the water temperature, a seagull flying by, the sound of the waves breaking inshore, the feeling of the contest vest over my chest, the current swirling below as I balance standing with paddle in hand on my SUP. A three wave set approaches and I am in position. The first goes by under my board as I paddle over it (its too small), as does the second (its going to break too fast), but for the third I turn and paddle – I know this wave will unfold and allow me to flow. That begins another surf blink, on surf blink, on surf blink, during the instinctual ride along the wave selected.

Where are SA’s gay surfers?

~ Glen Thompson ~ Leave a comment
It's time to start questioning the ying and yang of gender in South African surfing.

I’ve been surfing in Cape Town with a woman surfer who is openly lesbian but, to my knowledge, I have not shared waves with a gay male surfer. What is it that has made South African surfing so homophobic that gay men do not readily “surf out” in the line-up?

While South African competitive surfing in the past has been somewhat tolerant of women surfers coming out, any questioning of a male surfer’s sexual preference has been, and remains, closely patrolled by the surf media and industry to be shown as hetrosexual. Youthful surf fashion, it seems, cannot allow for gender slippages. Nevertheless, this is not just a South African trend as globally there is an unspoken homophobia within surfing circles.

In looking for answers in writing a gendered history of surfing culture in South Africa – one that is critical of how the  idealised images of hetrosexy boys and girls have come to be the normal way of representing surfers – I was recently directed to a link to a gay surfer online resource that was advertised in a German surfing magazine.

Gaysurfers.net (which can also be found as a Facebook group) aims to foster a gay surfing social network as well as provide a site for creating awareness of the need to fight homophobia in the surf by encouraging tolerance of gay surfers at local breaks. In “Surf’s Out“, a story published in DNA, an Austalian gay men’s magazine, in June of this year, Nick Cook writes of how membership of the Gaysurfers website has grown (to date there are 1,500 members globally). He also profiles some of the men who have come out, their attitudes to surf culture, and their reflections on why they think surfing is anti-gay.

Another article entitled “Queer Waves“, published last week (23 June) on the Australian online surf media site Swellnet by Dr Clifton Evers (a cultural researcher at the University if New South Wales),  confirms many of the trends noted in Cook’s article despite the fact that surf culture encourages male-bonding but not male desire among surf buddies: “The policing of male-to-male social bonding and mateship in surfing is common, and is due to an ever-present undercurrent of homophobia.” Evers calls for straight surfers to stop being silent on the issue of homophobia – he notes that that silence makes one complicit in the exclusion of gay surfers from local surfing communities.

The two films noted by Evers – Tan Lines (2006) set in Australia and Shelter (2007) set in California – are worth watching (you will be able to find them in local indie DVD stores) and go far in highlighting that gay men surf despite the ostracism and denial so pervasive in surf culture. Its time for a similar South African production since  I do not think the forthcoming Blue Crush 2 movie will be introducing a gay surfer into the storyline.