Tag: gender

New critical surf studies episodes on The Deep Duck Dive Podcast

~ Glen Thompson

Three more episodes of season one of the The Deep Duck Dive Podcast are now available to listen to and we (co-hosts Karen Graaff and Glen Thompson) paddle out into the waves of social and historical matters relating to surfing.

Episode 2 is on the topic of The Waves Don’t Discriminate. In this episode, we discuss the issue of fairness in sport, and how a term that sounds neutral is in fact heavily politicised. We start with the definition of fairness in sport generally and then turn to fairness in surfing. The episode addresses the bans on trans women in sport, including surfing, and look to the gender politics behind those bans as well as the attempts by sporting bodies to use policies to regulate transgender involvement in sport. Listen to episode two of the podcast here.

Episodes 3 and 4 is a two-part survey the history of surfing in Africa. In Episode 3: History of Surfing in Africa Part 1: The Colonial Archive we focus primarily on the history of surfing in West Africa, which has colonial records of African aquatic activities. This history draws on the historical work of Kevin Dawson which explores, and reclaims, West African aquatic practices and we also speculate on what other historical sources scholars could look to when opening up the archives to find evidence for surfing in the past elsewhere along the extensive African coastline. We focus the period from the early modern period (c. 1500) to the beginning of the twentieth-century (c. early 1900s). Listen to episode of the podcast here.

In Episode 4: History of Surfing in Africa Part 2: The Modern Era we focus on surfing in Africa during the modern era, from c. early 1900s to the present. We cover the topics of surfing and the British Empire and indigenous African surfing practices in West Africa before 1945, the era of “surf discovery” in Africa in the Sixties and Seventies, and then the diffusion of surfing through the processes of surf tourism, non-profit led social development, and sportisation in Africa from the 1990s and 2000s – taking the story up to surfing’s entry into the Olympics in the 2020s. Listen to episode of the podcast here.

Listen to all The Deep Duck Dive Podcast episodes here.

Launch of The Deep Duck Dive Podcast

~ Glen Thompson

Announcement: Co-hosts Glen Thompson (Research Fellow, History Department, University of Stellenbosch) and Karen Graaff (Research Fellow, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape), academics and surfers based in Cape Town, South Africa, have launched The Deep Duck Dive Podcast – a public pedagogy and public scholarship podcast engaging with the oceanic turn in the global South by focusing on issues that matter within surfing as a lifestyle sport.

While the podcast has been a work in progress for some time, see our journal article in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning published open access here in 2023 for our documentation of our approach to scholarly podcasting and thinking with/in surfing, we launched the podcast on 30 September 2024. We aim to publish new episodes every two weeks.

Season 1 of the podcast opens with a pilot episode introducing the podcast and ourselves. Episode 1 is titled: Surfing history – Why History Matters. The theme for the first season is, What could surfing (be)come, and makes use of hydrocolonialism, hydrofeminism and critical surf studies perspectives to explore the following topics: surfing’s colonial history, the history of surfing in Africa, surfing and social change, discrimination and the waves, inclusive surfing spaces, and surfer environmental consciousness. In these episodes we seek to challenge and subvert surfing’s normalisation of certain raced, gendered, classed, and ableised bodies; both in past and in the present and so re-imagine surfing’s future through a social justice lens as decolonised and inclusive sporting and leisure activity. A Season 2 of the podcast is planned for 2025.

Listen to The Deep Duck Dive Podcast 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.