Surfer Girls in the New World Order (review)

Krista Comer's Surfer Girls in the New World Order exemplifies the most prominent theoretical trends that are transforming contemporary western studies. Recontextualizing surf culture within a transnational context, connecting surfing to current debates about globalization, and exploring complex interrelations between the local and the global, Comer's analysis of transnational surf culture vividly illustrates western studies' recent critical regionalist, transnational, and post-western "turns." Focusing still more specifically on how surf culture intersects with the gender politics of both traditional and emergent (third-wave) feminisms, Surfer Girls explores how surfing develops what Comer describes as "girl localisms" that connect gender with place (221). While Comer's methods and terminology draw upon some well-credentialed critical precedents, she twists and refocuses these critical discourses to create a unique project that is unmistakably all her own. In particular, what most distinguishes Surfer Girls methodologically is the way that it moves "increasingly toward ethnography" by focusing primarily on unconventional source materials such as extensive personal experiences, interviews with surfers and workers in the surf microeconomy, explorations of rapidly gentrifying international beach towns, short bios of professional surfers, and detailed descriptions of female-oriented clothing lines, surf camps, and surf shops (29). Stretching from the macrogeopolitics of Hawaii's colonization to the microgender politics of swimwear design, Comer's project sprawls across a vast critical terrain largely of her own making.

Reversing decades of critical neglect that produced only a "single scholarly book" on surf culture, Surfer Girls fundamentally challenges critics to reconsider the significant role that surfing's "values and languages" have played in "articulat [ing] some of the most consequential changes in both local and global cultural and economic life" (11, 6). Through a quick analysis of a few canonical surf texts—such as the Gidget novels and films, the Beach Blanket movies, Endless Summer (1966), and Blue Crush (2002)—Comer attempts to re-envision "new forms of contemporary femininity and of surf culture" by rejecting traditional interpretations of the "Gidget phenomenon" as the "height of the nonbright, the noncommitted" and counter-arguing instead that Gidget and her progeny articulate a more radical "ideology of female freedom" and "rebel girl femininity" that "threatened the status quo" (4, 38, 43, 49-50). Later, Comer interprets Luna Bay: A Roxy Girl (starting 2003), a series of surf novels for adolescent girls, commissioned by the fashion industry. She finds that the novels were part of a "multilayered marketing outreach program" which interweaves literature with online book clubs, chat rooms, environmentalism, modeling opportunities, and new clothing lines and a way of helping advertise "surfing as a form of youth citizenship" with "political ecocommitments," "social consciousness," and "global ethics" (80, 113). Challenging Baywatch stereotypes, Comer reinterprets surf culture as resolutely, albeit imperfectly, political, transnational, environmentalist, multiculturalist, and feminist. With these bold reinterpretations, Comer encourages serious reconsideration of—if not outright debate about—surf culture's larger cultural and political significance.

Provocatively extending her analysis of the gender politics surrounding surf culture, Comer attempts to create a new "intergenerational conversation" between traditional second-wave feminism and alternative third-wave feminisms that draw upon what Comer describes as "Generation X's ferocity, courage, and willfulness" and "Generation Y's 'girlishness,' girl-gang solidarity, and female pride" (17, 103). Claiming that the "figure of the surfer girl has the potential to teach older feminists much," Comer throws down a critical gauntlet, challenging traditional feminists to embrace new forms of "girlish play" that might threaten their "aversion to frivolity" or sense of "midlife responsibility" but may potentially reawaken the "'bad girls' so many of [the] boomer feminists used to be" (28, 134, 127, 140, 135). Frequently citing the Las Olas surf camp's goal of making "girls out of women," Comer seems to side with, or at least take seriously, the unorthodox values of third-wave feminist youth cultures, advocating an inverted, intergenerational logic that echoes Carla Lonzi and Rivolta Feminile's Italian feminist manifesto "Let's Spit on Hegel" or any number of...