"We have to establish our territory": how women surfers ‘carve out’ gendered spaces within surfing

Abstract

This Research Insight piece examines how southern California recreational women surfers experience, cope with and contest their marginalized status within the male-dominated sport of surfing. Drawing on literature that focuses on women in alternative sports, I argue that women surfers face similar contradictions, such as developing strategies to cope with and contest their marginalized status and creating separate spaces. Surfing is a fruitful area of study because it is a recreational activity that is not bound by any formal rules or regulations that separate women and men from participating with each other, but as this study will show, surfers are constructing gender boundaries. This study builds on existing literature that examines the varying ways sporting women resist and reproduce dominant cultural understandings of gender, as well as focusing on how creating separate spaces is a source of empowerment for women in masculinized spaces.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.