The long and short of (performance) surfing: tightening patriarchal threads in boardshorts and bikinis?

Abstract

Surfing economies, working through material culture in the form of high fashion clothing, surfing monikers or fashion clothing has had scholarly attention in the past. Unlike other sports however, clothing for performance rather than fashion or cultural consumption remains under-researched. With increasing research on the gendered and sexualized nature of surfing alongside an increasing emphasis on female surfing as athletic performance, a paradox seems apparent. In warm-water competition, women deal with tensions associated with appearance, sponsorship driven by sexual objectification and functional surfwear that increases exposed body surface – while men’s clothing epitomizes comfort, protection and ultimately a reduction in exposed body surface. Under the guise of athletic performance and celebrating female gains in the sport, a patriarchal thread seems to tie up a particular sex, gender and sexuality order that is neither new nor productive for high performance or full participation.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to elke emerald for helpful comments and encouraging perseverence in getting this work published after it got lost in the system. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their guiding comments.

Notes

1. Carparks are often where clothing change occurs before and after surfing. It can be quite public with change hapening under a towel, between open doors of a car or behind a sarong.

2. This is a fictional rendering created from a montage of deidentified quotes by twenty high performance short board and longboard female surfers from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, USA, Hawai‘i, Japan and Peru in interviews with the author. The sentiment expressed about surf wear was often repeated. Interviewees were reticent to be identified through fear of not achieving, or losing sponsorship.

3. For the purposes of this paper, interrogation of the complex inter-relationship and separateness of each concept – sex, gender, sexuality – is not necessary, although important at another level. See lisahunter (2017, Forthcoming) for further detail.

4. Cold-water surfing using wetsuits is the topic of another paper and not included here.

5. Cisgender femininity refers to dominant forms of socially constructed femininity for a person whose designated sex is female. Also referred to as hyperfemininity or hegemonic femininity. Patriocolonial refers to patriarchal forms of colonialism that have framed, and I argue continue to frame, much of women’s performance surfing including the normative binary of male and female, heteronormativity and ultimately cisgender femininity tied to constructs of beauty and surfing sponsorship for women (see lisahunter 2016).

6. At this point, I also want to make it clear that I do not assume that the whole surf industry, all male surfers and all male consumers of surf magazines (who may be a different constituency) are homogeneous and all heterosexual, and some or all of these groups look at female surfers as only sexualized bodies – but exploring more nuanced evidence for these potential readings is for future work.

7. There is a window period of extended time in which officials and competitors will decide which days they will run the competition depending on weather, tide and wave quality. Rest days or lay days are called when conditions are deemed poor or of less quality than that predicted for other days in the competition window.

8. Note: in the time between first writing this paper in late 2015 and submitting for revision in late 2016, there had been some significant changes to the range and presence of board shorts among the major surf brands. Performance was however still not a marker of advertising.