Looking Back — IWS at Stanford (2017-2019)
Professor Comer’s visit to Stanford’s Lane Center for the American West was geared toward research growing out of the book Surfer Girls in the New World Order.
Two projects focused on issues of coastal access for women surfers and contributed to the Center’s California Coastal Commission Project.
Project I. Institute 2017 Issues of Access
With the generous support of the Bill Lane Center, the Institute held its 2017 training, designed around the theme of “Issues of Access.” Making use of “issues of access” as a conceptual and practical point of departure, the 2017 Institute explored what access means, and for whom? In what ways are issues of access also feminist issues? The term “access” suggests government initiatives – as in policies that make surf breaks, or beaches, accessible to a broad citizenry. The term alerts us to indigenous governance claims as well. It also suggests realms of imagination and art. Film, for instance, creates new understandings of the self, as well as of space and place.
The 2017 Institute asked how activists working in different arenas of women’s surfing – nonprofits, youth advocacy, indigenous revitalization, the arts, storytelling, the campaign for women’s inclusion at Mavericks – address shared but divergent access challenges? In non-US contexts, what access issues are priorities and what bodies of governance are relevant political players?
Here is the Institute 2017 Research Report from this meeting. See also the short essay “Beaches as Spaces of Democracy.”
Project II. “Battles over Mavericks” & What They Teach
Related to the Mavericks controversies, Professor Comer presented lectures at Stanford and the Global Wave Conference interpreting the exclusion of women competitors from the Mavericks contest in light of gendered struggles for space, authority, belonging, and “ownership” of public resources. “The Battle for Mavericks & Other Western Showdowns” highlighted links between the masculine social dynamics at Mavericks and what we might think of as very classic tales of struggles over space and environmental resources in the history and contact zones of the American West. Lecture take aways included the novel contributions of organizational entities like the California Coastal Commission to a revised US West cultural history so it actively engages feminist civil rights issues and rolls back settler colonial masculine entitlements. Also important: the coalition of women activists and IWS participants who backed the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing.
Professor Comer advanced the concept of surfeminism as a decolonial perspective or a politics of sharing space. Surfeminism enacts community and suggests a vision of sharing place that would speak to bonds between men (one of the perceived losses at stake for contest organizers) while redesigning them away from networks of control.