Surfing Places, Surfboard Makers: Craft, Creativity, and Cultural Heritage in Hawaii, California, and Australia

Chapter 5: Crafting Surfboards: Gender, Bodies, and Emotions

145 [ 5 ] Crafting Surfboards GENDER, BODIES, AND EMOTIONS WE EXAMINE IN THIS CHAPTER WHAT working as a surfboard maker means emotionally, how it relies on (and in turn impacts) the body, and how it becomes gendered. We gather further insights from interviews with individual board makers and from their personal stories. What are the emotions that surround working, playing, and living as a maker of surfboards? In the introduction we discussed the inseparability of emotions from understandings of rational behavior: people in all aspects of life make decisions and relate to the world through multiple logics. People do things for complex reasons, some explainable, others intangible and instinctive . On the surface, the whole enterprise of hand making surfboards now appears economically imprudent, even irrational. The commercialization, corporatization, and automation, which we discuss in subsequent chapters, make crafting boards by hand seem antiquated. And yet board makers in Hawai‘i, California, and Australia remain passionate and committed to their craft. This situation compels consideration of the personal and emotional dimensions of cultural production: the mythologies of hand making that link present-day board production to its historical antecedents, the closely guarded secrets of shaping and sealing surfboards, the bodily pains and pleasures of making specialized possessions for individual customers who in turn frequent the same waves as the makers themselves. During workshop tours, interviews, and even out in the surf, we asked board makers about financial matters, technology, and the emotional dimensions of their economic interactions, how work was performed, the things that influenced decision making, their interactions with other workers , retailers, and customers. Interactions take place not just in a commercial sense but also across an emotional industry terrain.1 This is a landscape of 146 CHaPter 5 commerce but also of social relationships, networks, and friendships. At the same time, there is great potential for coercion and exploitation in the surfboard -manufacturing industry. Emotions of anxiety, anger, and apprehension mix with pleasurable, satisfying elements in the daily life of surfboard makers. Hand shaping and customizing surfboards solidify passionate, “soulful” attachments to work, propagate subcultural legacies, and renew bonds between local surfers and makers. They also, however, attach workers to ever-more precarious jobs that in some cases end up hurting their bodies. There is also a visible and pervasive gender dimension of surfboard production that shapes the industry’s emotional terrain. It is a “blokey” industry. But participants said that this is partly why they like the job. Scrutiny of the surfboard industry’s emotional and gendered dimensions reveals how a sense of self and attachment to the job coalesce; how a passion for making boards develops through the crafting of foam and fiberglass, and how the industry has established certain gendered dimensions. “Strong Bodies”: the Predominance of Men in the Surfboard Industry In precontact Hawai‘i, both men and women participated in surfing. Surfing style was not neatly divided along gender lines. Judgments of surfing performance did not privilege a masculine, aggressive riding style. Men and women were considered of equal ability in the surf zone.2 Where surfing participation and surfboard making were hierarchical was along a class axis. Kapu defined what types of boards maka‘ainana could ride, with some surf breaks also “off limits to commoners.”3 These regulations were policed by the ali‘i.4 Precolonial forms of Hawaiian surfing were, if anything, aligned to what Westerners would categorize as a feminine reading of the body: the ocean was valued as a nurturing, spiritual space. By the nineteenth century, with the changes brought by colonization, surfing participation in Hawai‘i became dominantly practiced by native and haole men. While some Hawaiian women (and increasing numbers of haole women) continued to surf, Hawaiian men in particular maintained surfing identities as a way to resist imperial suppression and cultural encroachment on land.5 Meanwhile, early surfing in California and Australia was experimental: in the first decades of the twentieth century, women participated unselfconsciously as much as men did, in a comparatively liberated era (figure 5.1). After World War II, however, surfing came under more conservative cultural and societal norms. In the 1950s and 1960s, surfing and the surf zone were often viewed as inappropriate for women. In these contexts, surfing evolved to favor masculine attributes, Crafting Surfboards 147 while female surfers, always an underestimated presence on California and Australian beaches, were considered by male surfers to be weaker.6 Their style was depreciated...