Speaking Out
Our curriculum is organized around the idea of “Speaking Out” — all of the materials, and the women who have created them, are talking about topics that make the general public uncomfortable. Women are speaking out anyway.
Feminism in surfing is absolutely not a welcome topic amongst a lot of the surf communities in the UK. We are interested to see if this is the case in other parts of Europe. Many of us in the UK have been threatened or intimidated for organizing on behalf of women. There is a total lack of understanding around the term ‘feminism.’
The curriculum celebrates women across a wide spectrum of ideas about ‘what it is to be female’ and pushes boundaries on what femininity is. We are also thinking critically across the many differences between women — race, class, and sexuality, in particular. A key aspect of ‘collaboration’ is alliance building, and becoming allies to those who are different.
Motherhood is also very important to discuss openly as it affects all women — whether one becomes a mother or not. In the UK, we don’t discuss the hardships of motherhood enough. Is this difficulty true across Europe? A lot of women find their female relationships negatively impacted by the birth of children, even though birth should be a time of greater connection and solidarity. What gets in the way of better alliances between women when children are born? In surfing, women often give up getting in the water for long periods of time, sometimes they give it up all together. What follows from that can be a loss of identity, friendship networks, and social isolation. These kinds of impacts are gendered — they hit women much harder than they do men.
How can feminism as a philosophy and a practice help us think through the above challenges of women’s lives as well as tensions between women across social spectrums? What does it mean to collaborate in specifically feminist ways? These questions are here so participants can reflect in advance. We write about the materials here on the website to give you a sense of how we are thinking about them, and we look forward to hearing how you think about them. There is not a “right answer,” they are here as prompts for the thinking we will do together, as a group.
You will see the curriculum includes music, instagram poetry, academic writing, and popular writing. We gathered it by asking a several participants what they thought was important, and included their words here on this page: thanks to Dani Robertson, Sophie Hellyer, Lyndsey Stoodley, and Krista Comer (writing this) for suggestions. So the process was collaborative. All of the material should be generally understandable, but don’t worry if you don’t understand or identify with this or that — we can talk about all these matters when we are together! If it’s helpful to you, take notes and bring questions. This educational part is for YOU — use it as best you can.
There are six items below — only the last one (by me, Krista) has anything to do directly with surfing, and it’s only 10 minutes! 
These materials perhaps add up to more than 3-4 hours of reading, but give it the 3 0r 4 hours, if you have more, great, but if not, let that be enough.
On Speaking Out
- Holly McNish, https://www.instagram.com/holliepoetry/
Also known as Holly Poetry, McNish is a spoken word artist and writer from Glasgaw, Scotland. She has written five books of poetry, and lives today in Cambridge. Much of her work appears in novel formats, for instance through instagram accounts.
Hollie’s poems have been called heart felt, scrappy, and they cover a range of topics including breastfeeding and motherhood. Her poem ’embarassed’ is about breastfeeding her daughter in a public toilet because of the stigma of openly breastfeeding in public has been shared over a million times. Seeing the radical potential of Holly’s work, UNICEF invited her to speak in a conference about infant feeding and mortality rates.
Hollie constantly normalises taboos through her work, from morning sickness to complicated family dynamics, breaking through the constant imagery of idealistic pregnancies, births and families. An important topic she broaches is female anger. Women aren’t ‘allowed’ by society to be angry; it doesn’t fit with ideals of female pleasantness and roles of caregiving.
2. Rupi Kaur https://www.instagram.com/rupikaur/
Rupi Kaur is an Indian Canadian poet, illustrator, writer and performer. She was born into a Sikh, Punjabi family who emigrated to Canada when she was 4. Not a native speaker of English initially, she used art to communicate with her peers.
Her poetry addresses cultural taboos such as menstruation, mental health, self care and self love.
Her work is in lower case as a statement about her world view, a desire to represent equality among the letters. Most of it appears on Instagram and each poem is enriched by illustrations making her work both accessible and highly visual.
Her work has drawn comparison to other important poets like Nayyirah Waheed.
On Feminist Courage & Issues of Difference
3. Sara Ahmed, https://lithub.com/sara-ahmed-once-we-find-each-other-so-much-else-becomes-possible
This excerpt is an interview about writing Living a Feminist Life. Ahmed is a British/Australian intellectual and prolific writer. She is interested in thinking about race, difference, stranger-ness, and how bodies and worlds take shape in relation to one another. Until 2016, she was Professor at Goldsmith’s University in London. She resigned from this post and left university life all together in protest of the failure of the university to deal with sexual harassment in her department. In this interview Ahmed likens the university to a house, and urges feminists to understand “homework” as work both in, and on, their homes. “Home” for much of Ahmed’s life was the university, and she is now making a life for herself as a “post-institutional” feminist, meaning someone with the skills of a professor working outside university contexts. We might think of surf culture as one of the homes we take care about.
This essay is assigned to keep us strong and clear and not confused by the threat of being called the “killjoy” — the person who is blamed for noticing sexism as though she created it, rather than is reporting it. The piece also gets us thinking about “finding each other,” finding those whose purposes and visions of the world line up with ours, orient us. For us in the world of surfing, we might read this piece as an aid to thinking not about university but about surf life, and the complications of it for women surfers or those with feminist perspectives.
4. Christine and The Queens music video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0NMTuz9Duo
Christine (Héloïse Letissier) is a performance focused French artist who identifies as pansexual. Her work was inspired by trips to London and encounters with London drag queens. She invited them to tour with her, and hence the name. Her writing and performance address LGBTQ+ community challenges, is often billingual, and confronts issues of queer guilt, shame, but also expresses the freedoms of gender fluidity.
Her music videos show ambiguous human forms that do not work from the sexualisation of the female body or from normative gender performance. ‘Half-ladies’ is dedicated to women who don’t fit feminine ideals, and ‘safe and holy’ celebrates dance as a way to reclaim body autonomy. Christine is often seen as being ‘too much’ and ‘surprising’ as she openly talks about female sexuality and desire.
As a young woman she went to University to do theatre studies. Unbelievably, in 2010, only males were allowed to direct plays! So Christine staged her own show, without permission. The faculty expelled her.
She asks people to refer to her as ‘a voice’ rather than a female performer. She was offered record deals to be the next ‘Lana del Ray’ or ‘the French Lady Gaga,’ which she declined. Finally she found a label who invited her to be herself.
5. Reni Eddo-Lodge, “Preface,” from Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race.
This piece asks us to think about ourselves as white people, and to understand whose job it is to listen to talk about race, and to educate ourselves about histories of race (including of whiteness). For our discussions, we focus only on the Preface, or first section, though you will see from the Table of Contents how valuably ranging the book is, including in its work on racial legacies of feminism. We will want our work to build capacity for alliances with people of color, and women of color. Conversations about privilege are a starting place for alliance, but they should not be ends in themselves — the ends involved learning how to give to and take the direction of communities and leaders of color.
6. Krista Comer. You Tube (10 minutes) from Surfer Girls in the New World Order
This YouTube is good for a quick overview of the “big picture” ideas from the book. It talks about why Comer wrote the book; it links women’s surfing in the 90s to girl power, to political economy, to specific geographies of surfing, and to the effort by women surfers to make their livelihoods in surf subcultural economies such as: surf shops, international surf camps, responsible tourism, surf lessons and organizations, photography, filmmaking, magazine work, etc.
Regarding Collaboration . . . The book would not have happened without the tremendous amount of thinking contributed by surfing women — their minds together with my mind created a collaborative knowledge project that is in evidence on every page. I am very grateful for the support of surfers and this work has just grown in the years since the Institute for Women Surfers was conceived (in collaboration) and continues as a collaboration.