Surfing, Sex, Genders and Sexualities

lisahunter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351781381
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Sex, gender and sexuality have played an important role in shaping the culture of surfing and are central themes in the study of sport and movement cultures. Rooted in a rich precolonial history, surfing has undergone a modern transformation shaped by visual culture, commodification, sportization, mediatization and globalization, arguably all linked to sex, gender and sexuality. Using the physical culture of surfing as its focus, this international collection discusses the complex relationships between surfing, sex/es, gender/s and sexuality/ies.

This book 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.

Surfing, Sex, Genders and Sexualities is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology of sport or gender and sexuality studies.

Chapter 1
Surfing, sex/es, gender/s and sexuality/ies

lisahunter

Introduction

Sex, gender and sexuality (sgs) are three concepts that are shaped historically and culturally, in how they are defined, in how they are constituted, and in how they constitute each other, or not. How each are constituted and constituting in cultures, bodies and practices is the topic of much scholarship spearheaded by feminism, gender studies, Lesbian and Gay studies, critical theory, cultural studies and queer studies. Scholars such as Joan Scott, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault suggest there is a futility in trying to hold the meanings of the concepts in place, but meaning is also what makes each significant in interrogating their meanings and effects in place and over time. Gender, as an historical object and category, includes not only regimes of truth about sex and sexuality production and mobilization but also fantasies and transgressions that refuse regulation or categorization (Scott, 2011). In 1986, Joan Scott attempted to ask questions about the usefulness of ‘gender’, later stating ‘I want to insist that the term gender is useful only as a question’ (2008a, p. 1422); these questions being important in understanding the taken-for-granted assumptions inherent in concepts and in offering new thinking and analysis. Configurations are contingent, making space for new, unthought possibilities and futures.

More specifically in the fields of sport, movement and physical culture, sgs has been the focus of scholarship relatively more recently, produced under the cognate area of kinesiology, human movement studies, sports studies or similar. Scholarship relating to society more generally, and sport more specifically has explored definitions and relationships of sgs, yet until this edited collection, essays related to sgs and surfing have had little attention beyond individual journal articles, isolated chapters or sections in monographs. Much of this literature would be regarded as ‘critical’ in its framing, going beyond narrow forms of historicization.

The importance of the critical nature of past and contemporary work needs to be emphasised. At a time where conservativism, fake news, appropriation of language, narrow forms of education, misinformation and backlash politics work to devalue intellectual critique, civic engagement, social activism, stultification of change in power structures and privilege, and an uncovering of a spectrum of violences, it remains important for scholars and non-scholars alike to engage in critical work. Like the backlash towards feminism work and the concept of ‘feminism’, critical theory and critical intellectual work has been demonised, misrecognised and/or dismissed as criticism rather than understood as critique. Such moves attempt to reduce societal means of recognising situations and issues that oppress, they reduce our capabilities to ask the necessary deeper questions that lie below the assumptions of the superficial surface of mundane everyday life. Critique provides spaces for non-dominant perspectives, revealing hidden power politics between humans and between their groupings, revealing injustices and making way for new possibilities. Practices of recognition, revealing, creating alternatives are important in critical scholarship. So too is thinking and conceptualising, two practices heralded by humans to justify distinction from other beasts. ‘Thinking outside the box’ is a phrase used to celebrate creativity, human progress, invention and intelligence and also aligns with scholarship and critique. Ideas, new concepts, diverse contexts and well-thought-out theory provides opportunities for new practices, new ways of being, new relationships and new or revisited questions and answers to some of the violences in our social and ecological world. Critical work is also critical in terms of it being ‘vital’ as in ‘essential’ – challenging the hidden politics that provide false justifications that maintain practices that alienate, marginalise, oppress and retard more equitable practices and conserve violations. Critical scholarship is also not just about documenting and deconstructing lived experiences, but also about reconstructing perceptions and providing possible imaginaries through diverse responses to problems and issues.

This book was created in order to recognise the significant but small volume of scholarship attending to sgs in relation to surfing, to encourage and communicate some of the critical scholarship emerging in contemporary times, and to stimulate further scholarship, policy and instutional actions and grassroots practices that helps us understand the practices associated with surfing. As noted by Joan Scott:

The point of critique is not to tear down or destroy but, by bringing to light the limits and inconsistencies that have been studiously avoided, to open up new possibilities, new ways of thinking about what might be done to make things better. Critique does not offer a map that leads to a guaranteed future; rather, it disturbs our settled expectations and incites us to explore, indeed to invent, alternate routes.

(2008b, p. 7)

As noted by Dexter Zavalza Hough-Snee and Alexander Sotelo Eastman, critical scholarship in surfing is recent: with ‘intellectual and critical undercurrents within popular media that gave rise to critical surf studies’ partnered with an “incestuous relationship” between surf industry’s “revolving door” between publications, advertisers, and competitive governance [that] has hampered investigative journalism’ and other forms of critique (2017, p. 9). Their chapter summarizes the critical literature including the seminal scholarly articles and monographs that proliferated in the mid-nineties to now. Specifically related to sgs in surfing, perhaps the most significant and extensive critique has been in Krista Comer’s monograph Surfer Girls in the New World Order (2010). Yet in this work, and the limited list dating only back to the mid-nineties, a list that will be summarized below, there still remains many opportunities for further investigation associated with the three concepts – sex, gender and sexuality – I would suggest particularly relating to sex practices and sexuality.

This chapter has three parts. The first explores the definition of each of the concepts as categories and practices, teasing out some of the contestations and inter-relationships between the concepts and their work as nouns and verbs. The second briefly describes how sgs has been constituted in surfing as captured in scholarship to date. This constitution in the practices of surfing is illustrated in its complexity by many of the chapters in this book, so I close with a summary of these chapters and pose a series of questions to provoke further scholarship.

Sex/es, gender/s and sexuality/ies-working definitions, contestations and inter-relationships

The concepts of sex, gender and sexuality, and the way they are constituted in spacetime are interdependent yet different and distinct. They are also concepts that have been called into question in terms of meanings and definition. Sex, gender and sexuality are concepts deeply rooted in cultural constructions often as taken-for-granted assumptions about identities, roles, relationships, practices or behaviors and appearance. This is no less apparent in surfing than in society at large and the related microcosm of sport more generally. As categories that are socially constructed they do particular work through perception, cognition, action and interaction. They interact with other subject positions, identities and practices that mark and position individuals and groups. In conjunction with identities such as race, ethnicity, religion, age, ability, size, experience, wealth and many other markers used to discriminate between people, sex, gender and sexuality are used to socially position people, or to define who one ‘is’ and what one ‘does’.

As binaries are usually read as closed circuits, essentialist sex identity categories of female/male create an assumed binary, erasing categories outside these two categories – simply by not naming them. Essentialist categories also deny intersectionality – with other categories such as race, class, age, size and, the more closely related but not necessarily clearly tied, gender and sexuality categories. Homogenization through categorization also erases differences within the categories, oversimplifying the relationship between those categories legitimated through the process of ‘recognition’ and potentially reinforcing hierarchies of (in)visibility (Caudwell, 2015). Categories also risk reproducing binaries, hierarchies and positioning strategies used to discriminate. As an example, ‘lesbian baiting’, a more nuanced form of misogyny, is only a successful technique to enforce compulsory heterosexuality and hyperfemininity if a surfer can be ‘recognized’ or positioned as lesbian and ostracized for being outside the orthodox heterosexuality, which is valued more highly than the binaried opposite, ‘homosexuality’. Increasing recognition of non-normative sexes, genders and sexualities, as well as fluidity in being and delinking sex from gender and sexuality, has queered the regulation of sgs. This queering has paved the way for a greater understanding and recognition of diversity and posed challenges to misogyny, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, biphobia, heteronormativity and the interlinked whitewashed phobias and discriminations such as ageism, poverty and so on. But a little more about the language of sex, gender and sexuality. What do these terms mean?

The term ‘sex’ can refer to a categorisation using binarized genetic, anatomical, biological and physiological differences to form two distinct groups; female (genetically XX) and male (genetically XY). While these are often taken-for-granted as clearly defined and natural categories, there has been critique and evidence to the contrary (Diamond & Sigmundson, 1997) for some time with both human and non-human evidence. Yet powerful and often hidden practices, justified through tropes of ‘normalcy’, have maintained the ‘naturalized’ binary, closing down the possibilities for recognizing greater variety and fluidity. Another biological category in humans, intersex, is still not widely acknowledged despite knowledge of its existence for some time (Cawadias, 1943). The term ‘intersex’ refers to a range of possibilities; those individuals who may have biological characteristics of both male and female; are genetically ‘opposite’ to what they present as anatomically; have an extra X or Y chromosome; or have ambiguous genitalia. A review of medical literature from 1955 to 1998 aimed at producing numeric estimates of the frequency of sex variations, approximated that the number of people whose bodies differ from defined ‘male’ or ‘female’ is one in a hundred, with one or two in every thousand receiving surgery to ‘normalise’ genital appearance (Blackless, Charuvastra, Derryck, Fausto-Sterling, Lauzanne, & Lee, 2000). In 1993, Anne Fausto-Sterling provocatively suggested going beyond the base of two immutable categories to at least five including herms, merms and ferms. Elof Carlson (2013) suggested seven sexes. Suzanne Kessler (1998) challenged Fausto-Sterling’s suggestions on the basis that this categorisation system still gives genitals the ‘primary signifying status and ignores the fact that in the everyday world gender attributions are made without access to genital inspection. What has primacy in everyday life is the gender that is performed, regardless of the flesh’s configuration under the clothes’ (p. 90). Kessler insists there is no sex, only gender, a point that many others have also argued, where ‘cultural genitals’ not biological configurations of material (p. 86) are key.

Adding to confusion in terminology, when sex is assumed to be biologically constructed it is often conflated, made synonymous with, or assumed to be tightly linked to a socially constructed gender (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Scholars such as Moira Gatens (1991) and Judith Butler (1993) have spoken to the limits of the notion of sex, arguing that the body is always a sexed subject because of gender categories, but more on this below.

In another line of critique, while classification of people according to their biological sex as only female or male may seem natural, thinkers such as Fine (2011) argue that there is more difference within each category than there is between the two categories, making this classification simplistic and divisive rather than complex, blurred and diverse; as it is in real life. The foundation assumption that underpins much of which falls under normalised sex categories is that there is a binary and that ‘natural’ needs, behaviors, appearances and relationships stem from this. This assumes that by identifying an individual’s biology and physiology one can generalize needs, behaviors, value, legitimacy, opportunities and possibilities for being and acting in the world. In this book we consider the identities, practices, and social outcomes that sex defines and influences. Here we explore and acknowledge that much scholarship and the field of surfing unproblematically depends upon grouping techniques based on biological categorization that silences or erases individuals and groups outside the binary, ignores the various individual characteristics and attributes within sex categories, and does so within an unproblematised and naturalised biology/physiology framework. In surfing female/male categories are heavily employed as simple, natural, unproblematic and deeply divisive categories conflated with gender and assumed an immutable hierarchical binary.

The first move of taking for granted a naturalised biology/physiology frame work of binaried sex also operates behind a second move, misrecognition of ‘sex’ conflated or hidden by the term gender, but also reinforced by a third move of normative sexuality, of heteronormativity. But before touching on gender and sexuality further, I want to say a little more about sex – as an act, a verb, rather than an identity category, an adjective – as it is very pertinent particularly to surfing as compared with many other lifestyle pursuits and sports.

‘Doing one’s sex’ – that is, enacting a category female/male, is constituted by the doing of sex as an act. This act of sex, in definition of a practice, seems very limited and messy. Normative definitions in western societies, underpinned by western science, Christianity and English language, tend to be limited to copulation and biological procreation, such as the circular and self-fulfilling definition found in the Oxford Dictionary where ‘sex act’ is ‘the act of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Surfing, sex/es, gender/s and sexuality/ies
• 2 E hua e: surfing and sexuality in Hawaiian society
• 3 Surfing, sponsorship and sexploitation: the reality of being a female professional surfer
• 4 Multiple marginalization?: representation and experience of bodyboarding in Japan
• 5 ‘Mexicans don’t surf’: an intersectional analysis of Mexican American’s experiences with sport
• 6 Social uses of the beach and relationships with transgressive bodies: being a female surfer in Morocco
• 7 A tale of two surf contests: gender, sex and competitive surfing in South Africa during the late 1970s and early 1990s
• 8 Stories of surfing: surfing, space and subjectivity/intersectionality
• 9 Queering surfing from its heteronormative malaise: public visual pedagogy of circa 2014
• 10 Surfing ali‘i, kahuna, kupua and akua: female presence in surfing’s past
• 11 (Counter)cultural changes in surfing and surfing scholarship: towards diverse, intersectional, liminal, complex and queer activism dialogues
• Index