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Abstract
The beach has long been a privileged site in Australian culture, and surfers have become icons of it. These men are often referred to as straight as steel, strong as granite, austere and inviolate. Drawing on over three decades worth of surfing I unpack this hegemonic understanding of men who surf, and reveal in its place the importance of feelings and bodies to their lives. Through an analysis of going surfing I articulate the role feelings and bodies play in how men belong, how they bond with their ‘turf’, come to understand themselves as masculine, and how they learn to do masculinity.
Pendant longtemps la plage était un site privilégié dans la culture australienne, et les surfeurs en sont devenus ses icones. Ces hommes sont souvent parlés d'être ‘droit comme acier’, ‘fort comme granite’, austère et inviolé. En utilisant plus que trois décennies du surf, je déballe cet compréhension hégémonique des hommes qui surfent, et je révèle dans sa place l'importance des sentiments et des corps dans leurs vies. Au travers d'une analyse d'aller surfer je mets dans perspective le rôle que les sentiments et les corps jouent sur comment les hommes appartiennent, comment ils s'attachent à leur ‘turf’, arriver à comprendre eux-mêmes comme masculines, et comment ils apprennent à faire masculinité.
Desde mucho la playa ha sido un sitio privilegiado en la cultura australiana, y los surfistas han llegado a ser sus iconos. Se reverencian estos hombres como tan derechos como el acero, tan fuertes como el granito, austeros y intactos. Deshago este entendimiento hegemónico de los hombres quienes hacen surf, utilizando más que treinta años de experiencia haciendo surf, y desvelo la importancia de emociones y cuerpos en sus vidas. A través un análisis de hacer surf, articulo el papel de emociones y cuerpos en cómo los hombres se pertenecen, cómo se establecen con su ‘terruño’, llegan a entender sí mismos como masculinos, y cómo aprenden hacer masculinidad.
Acknowledgements
I thank Elspeth Probyn, Katarina Olausson, and my colleagues at the Journalism and Media Research Centre, University of New South Wales (Catharine Lumby, Gerard Goggin, David McKnight, Kath Albury, and Kate Crawford).
Notes
1 By a lived body, I am referring to an active process, in which there is no unified biological body that is composed of permanent things and separate to the social. There is no definite boundary to determine where the body begins and external nature ends. A lived body recognises how there are occasions of experience that are not rooted in some unified ego in which I can claim a body as my own. The lived body never proceeds as some identical state as new elements and relationships intervene.
2 The gender structure that continues to dominate Australian society is a sex/gender ideology that categorises bodies according to what they are—male and female—and collapses sex into gender, with the concomitant expectations that follow from this distinction and model. Also, as philosopher Judith Butler has written, ‘the cultural associations of mind with masculinity and body with femininity are well documented within the field of philosophy and feminism. As a result, any uncritical reproduction of the mind/body distinction ought to be rethought for the implicit gender hierarchy that the distinction has conventionally produced, maintained and rationalized’ (1990: 33).
3 The body is not simply a part of historical, social, and cultural exigencies in which its biology basically remains the same. The historical, social, and cultural produce nature itself. The body is not pregiven but is an embodied history. The boys' bodies are constructed as being male, not female. ‘[T]he subject is always a sexed subject’ (Gatens Citation1996: 182).
4 For over twenty years R.W. Connell has looked at masculinity and male relationship in Australia. In a chapter entitled ‘An Iron Man: The Body and Some Contradictions of Hegemonic Masculinity’, Connell's (Citation1990) analysis centres on an Australian male lifesaver talking about his emotional experiences. According to Connell men are influenced by social discourses and institutions—like the military, schools and sports—that lead to the development of a ‘hegemonic masculinity’ that has ‘other masculinities arrayed around it’ (2000: 2). One of the key concepts to come out of Connell's work is the argument for a diversity of ‘masculinities’. This concept was developed to account for the shifting relations of dominance and marginalisation between groups of men. The dominant pattern of masculinity is forceful, unemotional and competitive. Connell provides an overview of different social settings to understand out how certain patterns of masculinity endure and change, and how bodies move into and out of them (2000: 20).
5 CitationDick Hebdige's Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) is a good reference point for discussing style at work. Hebdige argues that subcultures constitute expressive forms that disturb and block dominant systems of representations. According to Hebdige style is a collection of gestures, speech, fashion, rituals, modes of confrontation, and so on that become ‘maps of meaning’, or a system of signification. Through an analysis of subcultures in the 1960s, such as punks, rude boys, and skinheads, Hebdige demonstrates how style works as a signifying process. While Hebdige addresses how style is a process of signification he does not really unpack the action of style. Rather than understanding style as just expressing a semiotic system, we can also appreciate how style has an embodied immanence, and involves constant rearrangement and negotiation. Style is always evolving, taking on elements and discarding them.
6 Mind you, by expressing our mastery over the turf we forget that The Point and its traditional custodians were colonised. The Indigenous population of Australian surfing locations have experienced physical, social, and cultural displacement in order that we can feel like locals (McGloin Citation2005). However, some traditional custodians use localism to resist colonisation, such as in Hawai'i and Bali (Ishiwata Citation2002; Leonard Citation2007).