Rebecca Olive

Women's recreational surfing: a patronising experience

Research analysing the operation of power within sport and physical activity has exposed the marginalisation and exclusion of womens sport in explicit and institutionalised ways. However, for women in recreational and alternative physical activities like surfing, sporting experiences lie outside institutionalised structures, thus requiring alternative surfing of conceptualising the processes of exclusionary power. In this paper, we focus on the voices of women recreational surfers to explore the changes which may or may not be occurring at smaller, more localised levels of womens engagement with surfing culture. An ethnographic methodology was employed to ask women how and why they engage in surfing and what it means for them, rather than asking questions based on existing assumptions. In presenting the data we draw upon the double meaning afforded by the term ‘to patronise’ as a means of framing the complex ways that women continue to be differentiated in surfing culture, and the ways they respond to this. In the final section, we employ a Foucauldian analytic lens to explore the subtle normalising practices in which women are incited to recognise and undertake the practices of the valued masculine ideal of the ‘good surfer’ through caring acts and advice offered by male surfers. This post-structuralist perspective offers space to think outside of simple resistance and reproduction, instead considering a complex space where women and men negotiate power in a range of ways from contextual, subjective positions. In conclusion, we argue that women recreational surfers are enacting alternative ways of operating within the power relations that circulate in the waves, creating ever-changing spaces for new ways of doing and knowing surfing to emerge.

‘Making friends with the neighbours’: Blogging as a research method

During my research about women and surfing, I have found writing a blog useful as a tool for doing research in the cultural context of surfing. More than a simply a space to increase transparency in my ethnographic research process, blogging became a method of its own. Linking Elizabeth St Pierre’s discussion of research ‘folds’ with Elspeth Probyn’s encouragement to ‘think the social through myself’, blogging helped to address feminist concerns that research remains relevant to lived cultural understandings and experiences of the women participating. Blogging also helped in developing a language and a style of writing that reflects the experiences of surfing in a culturally meaningful way, and to provide a way of locating my own subjectivity within the research space. Through blogging I have been able to keep fieldnotes and ideas alive, engaged and in exchange throughout the project, moving and shifting through both theory and culture.

Reframing surfing: physical culture in online spaces

The social media app Instagram has become a popular everyday way to share visual representations of surfing culture and experiences. Providing an alternative to mainstream surf media, images posted on Instagram by women who surf recreationally both disrupt and reinforce the existing sexualisation and differentiation of women in surf culture. Images themselves are not necessarily resistant, yet women are asserting themselves as a voice of surf cultural authority through processes of posting, sharing and engaging with images. While ‘big data’ research about Instagram is proving useful in terms of mapping spaces and movements, this article adopts an ethnographic approach to explore the notion that social media developments are changing possible ways of knowing and representing the world in which we live. Also considered is how lived experiences and social media shape each other in everyday lives and communities.

On the track/in the bleachers: authenticity and feminist ethnographic research in sport and physical cultural studies

Much contemporary ethnographic research about alternative sports and physical cultures tends to value the ‘insider’ perspective, claiming that it provides a level of embodied understanding that cultural ‘outsiders’ struggle to access. Participatory research perspectives have come to be viewed as the most ‘authentic’, with participation itself defined by those who are doing/playing the activity. This often diminishes the value we place on meanings experienced by those on the sidelines/bleachers, which may be similar to or different from those of participants. This article explores these issues by placing the observations, experiences and insights of a ‘intimate insider’ in dialogue with those of an ‘interested outsider’, and considers the ways in which roller derby, as an alternative sport and leisure activity for women, presents both opportunities and limitations as a feminist and queer space. Taking a dialogic approach to questioning the authentic value of ‘insider’ research, we reveal a space where collaboration and curiosity become vital for maintaining high-quality, rigorous feminist research.

Going surfing/doing research: Learning how to negotiate cultural politics from women who surf

As a consequence of the dominance of men in recreational Australian surfing culture, the productive potential of the relationships between women who surf has been largely overlooked. However, as a (growing) minority, women who surf tend to know other women who surf, making relationships between women significant. This discussion explores the tensions in how women who surf in Byron Bay avoid, and yet engage in, the male-dominated politics of recreational surfing, and how this has shaped my own research contributions to surfing culture. In particular, it was their focus on relationships that impacted my approach to research and cultural participation. The women I interviewed were more interested in thinking through the possibilities, ethics and effects of various forms of action for women who surf more broadly, rather than explaining which were the most effective for getting more waves themselves. This had implications for my own research practice, and how I conducted myself in ‘contributing to the public good’ by producing resources for cultural change that aimed to be ‘relevant to the actual, concrete lives of women’.

Surfing Together: Exploring the Potential of a Collaborative Ethnographic Moment

With ethnographic methods key for action sport researchers, many are approaching the field with pre-existing cultural participation, knowledge and relationships. The complexities of researching from an “insider” perspective have inspired debates amongst scholars about validity, reflexivity and power in action sports cultures, as well as in research methods. Addressing issues of reflexivity in subjective and analytical isolation is difficult. This chapter discusses a collaborative research ‘moment’ in which seven researchers took part in the same ethnographic field visit to a surfbreak. In an exploratory way, the project sought to explore the potential of collaborative approaches to fieldwork for accessing multiple geographical and subjective perspectives in the field. This chapter focuses on the ‘dynamic tensions’ that emerged through the research process, and how these were productive in revealing difficult to locate and invisible positionalities that may impact our capacity to make sense and meaning of our observations and experiences as participants, observers and researcher’s.

Exploring critical alternatives for youth development through lifestyle sport: surfing and community development in Aotearoa/New Zealand

While competition-based team sports remain dominant in community and sport-for-development programs, researchers are exploring the value of alternative, less “sportized” activities such as lifestyle/action sports. In this paper, we explore the ways in which surfing is being used in development programs in Aotearoa/New Zealand, examining the perceived social benefits and impact. Our methods involved: (a) mapping the range of surfing projects; and (b) 8 in-depth interviews with program personnel. Widespread conviction in the positive developmental benefits of surfing was evident, and that surfing had a “special” capacity to reform or heal those who participate in it. However, the ways in which individuals’ self-developments were promoted appear to be following the traditional sport/youth development path. They focus on policies aimed at improved life chances, equipping youth with the tools for self-improvement and self-management, inculcating self-governance and self-reliance. However, a counter narrative co-existed, highlighting surfing as a freeing experience, which, rather than restoring social order, works to instigate a personal transformation or awakening. Despite the range of challenges presented by surfing as a tool for positive development, surfing presents a potentially “critical alternative” which if sport-for-development programs are to be a form of social change, we should remain open to exploring.

Looking back, moving forward? Reflections from early action sport researchers

This chapter acknowledges the significant contributions of early action sport scholars, and their ongoing influence on current thinking about the experiences of women as participants. With their work spanning a number of sports, Becky Beal, Douglas Booth, Jason Laurendeau, Catherine Palmer, Robert Rinehart and Belinda Wheaton, were amongst those who laid the foundations for the field, and have influenced the ideas, directions and approaches of the researchers in this book. This chapter presents a section of their reflections on the influences over their own work, it also highlights the role that author positionalities play in shaping such work, and concludes by offering some thoughts on future research directions and challenges facing action sports researchers interested in gender and women’s experiences.

Seascapes: shaped by the sea

References Sandel, M. (2012). What money can’t buy; the moral limits of markets. London: Allen Lane. Veal, A. J. (2009). The elusive leisure society (2nd ed., School of Leisure, Sport and Tourism Working Paper 9). Sydney: University of Technology, Sydney. Retrieved from http://www.leisuresource.net Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. London: Allen Lane.

Embodied pedagogies in human movement studies classrooms: A postgraduate pathway into teaching and learning

Contemporary cultural studies is engaged with the meanings people construct in their everyday lives, and how such meanings have significance. It explores how we understand our world, how we fit into our world, and, as a consequence, how others fit into our world (Couldry 2000; Morris 1998; Turner 2012). The major implication of this view is that the varied and subjective experiences of individuals’ impact on their understandings of what various cultures mean; individuals are not only affected by culture, but cultures are created, developed, maintained, manipulated, and expressed by people. To explore this, many cultural studies scholars have adopted reflexive, embodied theoretical and methodological approaches, which require them to be engaged with their own subjective position within their research, both as part of an institution (university) and as individuals with their own cultural histories, subjectivities, and relationships. The reflexive concerns of cultural studies researchers have impacted approaches they take to the teaching of cultural studies at an undergraduate level. As part of this, scholars are asking questions of how we might teach cultural theory in ways that are engaging and relevant to an ever-changing student population, and which present students with “the possibility of redrawing the boundaries around oneself ... where pedagogy becomes potentially transformational” (Garbutt, Biermann and Offord 2012, 79). That is, to teach content to reflect the way cultural studies is “critical and concerned with its contribution to the public good” (Turner 2012, 6–7). These approaches to pedagogy embraces pedagogical exchange as “the activation of new understandings, encounters and relationships” (Offord 2016, 54), an approach that unsettles and disrupts. Graeme Turner’s notion of cultural studies contributing to the public good and Baden Offord’s (2016) suggestion that cultural studies subjects can activate students as “a form of critical human rights education” (58), remain key drivers in my own development in higher education.