Surfing, gender and politics : identity and society in the history of South African surfing culture in the twentieth-century.

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study is a socio-cultural history of the sport of surfing from 1959 to the 2000s in South Africa. It criticallyengages with the 'South African Surfing History Archive, collected in the course of research, by focusing ontwo inter-related themes in contributing to a critical sports historiography in southern Africa. The first is howsurfing in South Africa has come to be considered a white, male sport. The second is whether surfing ispolitical. In addressing these topics the study considers the double whiteness of the Californian influencesthat shaped local surfing culture at 'whites only beaches during apartheid. The racialised nature of the sportcan be found in the emergence of an amateur national surfing association in the mid-1960s and consolidatedduring the professionalisation of the sport in the mid-1970s. Within these trends, the making andmaintenance of an exemplar white surfing masculinity within competitive surfing was linked to nationalidentity. There are three counter narratives to this white, male surfing history that have been hidden by thatsame past. Firstly, the history women's surfing in South Africa provides examples of girl localisms evidentwithin the masculine domination of the surf. Herein submerged women surfer voices can be heard in thecultural texts and the construction of surfing femininities can be seen within competitive surfing. Secondly,surfing's whiteness was not outside of the political. The effects of the international sports boycott againstapartheid for South African surfing were two-fold: international pressure on surfing as a racialised sport led tosanctions in the late 1970s against the amateur national surfing teams competing internationally ormaintaining international sporting contacts; and, as of 1985, the boycott by professional surfers of events onthe South African leg of the world surfing tour further deepened South African surfing's sports isolation. Bythe end of the 1980s, white organised surfing was in crisis and the status of South African as a surfing nationin question. Lastly, the third counter-narrative is the silenced histories of black surfing under apartheid.Alongside individual black surfer histories, the non-racial surfing movement in the mid-to-late 1980s isconsidered as a political and cultural protest against white organised surfing. The rationale for non-racialsport was challenged in 1990 as South Africa began its political transition to democracy. Nevertheless, theSouth African Surfing Union, the national non-racial surfing body, played a pivotal role in surfing's unificationin 1991 which led to South African amateur surfing's return to international competition in 1992. However, itwas an uneasy unity within organised surfing that set the scene for surfing development as a strategy forsports transformation in the post-apartheid years. The emergence of black surfing localisms after 1994 islocated within that history, with attention given to the promotion of young, male Zulu surfers withincompetitive surfing, which point to emergent trends in the Africanisation of surfing in the 2000s. It isconcluded is that while cultural change in South African surfing is evident in the post-apartheid present, thatchange is complicated by surfing's gendered and apartheid sporting pasts.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University