Overview

In Surfer Girls in the New World Order, Krista Comer explores surfing as a local and global subculture, looking at how the culture of surfing has affected and been affected by girls, from baby boomers to members of Generation Y. Her analysis encompasses the dynamics of international surf tourism in Sayulita, Mexico, where foreign women, mostly middle-class Americans, learn to ride the waves at a premier surf camp and local women work as manicurists, maids, waitresses, and store clerks in the burgeoning tourist economy. In recent years, surfistas, Mexican women and girl surfers, have been drawn to the Pacific coastal town’s clean reef-breaking waves. Comer discusses a write-in candidate for mayor of San Diego, whose political activism grew out of surfing and a desire to protect the threatened ecosystems of surf spots; the owners of the girl-focused Paradise Surf Shop in Santa Cruz and Surf Diva in San Diego; and the observant Muslim woman who started a business in her Huntington Beach home, selling swimsuits that fully cover the body and head. Comer also examines the Roxy Girl series of novels sponsored by the surfwear company Quiksilver, the biography of the champion surfer Lisa Andersen, the Gidget novels and films, the movie Blue Crush, and the book Surf Diva: A Girl’s Guide to Getting Good Waves. She develops the concept of “girl localism” to argue that the experience of fighting for waves and respect in male-majority surf breaks, along with advocating for the health and sustainable development of coastal towns and waterways, has politicized surfer girls around the world.

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9780822347897

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Surfer Girls in the New World Order is fantastic. The only book that I know of to address girls' and women's surfing from an analytical perspective, it opens into provocative questions about globalization and its discontents, 'ecotourism' and the surf safari, and conflicting paradigms of gender, economics, race, and culture.""oLeslie Heywood, author of The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism ""Krista Comer has earned her wave-smart street creds across Oceania, as she has in her prior learned scholarship on the making and gendering of the U.S. west. But this book, a pithy and colorful delight to read, delves into the murky politics and poetics of global surf iconographies to expose the gendered and discrepant tales of mastery, self-loss, oceanic mysticism, coming-of-age tales set in the salt waters along with eco-feminist mythologies and critiques, riddling local and global subcultures north and south. A player and a cultural critic, Comer reveals the enchanting and baffling cults of 'surf city' and the rise of the 'surfer girl' goddess. Gidget figurines, or Mavericks as such for that matter, can never be figured or narrated quite the sameohers is a crucial, timely, deftly organized, and compellingly readable study that is at once participatory, original, informed, sexy, and new.""oRob Wilson, author of Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond

Surfer Girls in the New World Order is fantastic. The only book that I know of to address girls' and women's surfing from an analytical perspective, it opens into provocative questions about globalization and its discontents, 'ecotourism' and the surf safari, and conflicting paradigms of gender, economics, race, and culture. oLeslie Heywood, author of The Women's Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third-Wave Feminism Krista Comer has earned her wave-smart street creds across Oceania, as she has in her prior learned scholarship on the making and gendering of the U.S. west. But this book, a pithy and colorful delight to read, delves into the murky politics and poetics of global surf iconographies to expose the gendered and discrepant tales of mastery, self-loss, oceanic mysticism, coming-of-age tales set in the salt waters along with eco-feminist mythologies and critiques, riddling local and global subcultures north and south. A player and a cultural critic, Comer reveals the enchanting and baffling cults of 'surf city' and the rise of the 'surfer girl' goddess. Gidget figurines, or Mavericks as such for that matter, can never be figured or narrated quite the sameohers is a crucial, timely, deftly organized, and compellingly readable study that is at once participatory, original, informed, sexy, and new. oRob Wilson, author of Reimagining the American Pacific: From South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond

Author Information

Krista Comer is an Associate Professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing.

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