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Surfer Girls in the New World Order
By Krista Comer
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4805-4
Chapter One
Californians in Diaspora
The Making of a Local/Global Subculture
Many [baby boomers] fondly remember their California childhoods, regardless of whether they grew up in the state. -Kirse Granat May, Golden State, Golden Youth
When the fictional surfer girl Franziska Lawrence is nicknamed "Gidget" and admitted to the all-male Malibu crew in 1957, nobody imagines this term of fond condescension (it means girl midget) will grow into a way to think about the history or politics of local and global surfing. This chapter works history backwards, so to speak, through the Gidget novels and films that initially popularized surfing as lifestyle and identity, and by way of them looks to actual teenage surfing girls in the 1950s of whom Gidget (or Kathy Kohner) became representative. I am interested in historical contexts and mid-century versions of girl localism. While I attend in some detail to subcultural masculinity, attributing women surfers' own alternative femininities in some measure to its inspiration and example, the intention is not to construct a bohemian, beatnik, or surfy version of male history to then have someplace from which to narrate female historical presence or agency. Prior to the first Gidget novel in 1957, gendered power struggles, a kind of leering anger at women in the water, did not characterize subcultural identity or behavior as sharply as it would thereafter. Before the arrival of missionaries, ancient Hawaiians had surfed for pleasure, religious ritual, competitive sport, and (in the case of the royals) to court one another. Queens as much as kings were renowned for their surfing prowess-and the subculture thrived on such lore. But in a flash point of change, practically overnight, popularization altered the subculture and its Hawaiian-derived gender formation. Surfing's pre-Gidget "golden age" of harmony and cooperation were over. Gidget in all its/her implications locates the moving center of these changes.
Crowds. More than any other outrage, it was crowds glutting the favorite breaks (Malibu much mourned) that set in motion both the need and the conditions of possibility for the creation of subcultural magazines, artwork, and cinema. Crowds motivated the search for new "virgin" global surf spots and produced, eventually, a global public. No single cultural text did more to invent an "us" and a "them," a subcultural inside and outside than The Endless Summer (1966), southern Californian Bruce Brown's answer of sorts to Gidget. The Endless Summer made explicit what was at least one conclusion of Gidget; it offered a response to crowds. Flee, The Endless Summer suggested as a solution. Escape, relocate, travel. Transport the western-local scene elsewhere. Imagining a series of places where surf and sun were easily available, a new dream took shape-the "surfari"-that ministered to the social pressures suggested by crowds.
It was a desperate solution. But the search for an endless summer was always about much more than waves. At mid-century, California ranked among the most coveted of national addresses: homeland to youth, orange blossoms, postwar opportunity, glamour. Few Californians left the promised land without permanent ambivalence, a sense of betrayal or forced exile. Indeed, imaginations of exile have played winning hands in forming the cultural logic of surfing's global public. We see in the aftermath of The Endless Summer the out-movement of diasporic scattering. Californians in exile from crowds, seaside traffic, and suburban sprawl: the homeland spoiled, a paradise now in memory only. If the dream was invented by one generation of young, mostly white Californian men, the larger enactment of it was undertaken by another and for both groups of men the motivation was not so much adventure (though that was always on the surface) but despair. What goes under the sign of "crowds" for this generation of young baby boomers, and how did surfing the globe answer it? To what degree has the reappearance of surfing at the turn of the twenty-first century permitted a return to these questions?
One of the most difficult things to study in U.S. society is middle-class culture and its discontents. Barbara Ehrenreich some years ago named one mid-century discourse of discontent a battle for "the hearts of men." The "hearts" to which she refers concern masculine social purpose, as well as physical health and well-being-both of which were popularly understood, Ehrenreich shows, as under assault from the gray-suit ideals of postwar manhood. Ehrenreich reads into this discourse a large permission for men to flee commitment to others. As I see it, surf subculture of the 1950s understood itself as a player in that battle. The subculture served as an everyday locus for struggles over the expectation that male coming-of-age meant lives organized around breadwinning for a nuclear family. Ehrenreich's The Hearts of Men persuasively argues for the dire implications of that battle for homemaking women and for children whose life possibilities depended on the family wage. Yet my work in this chapter on mid-century subcultural battles over manhood comes at the male-female power imbalance differently, since surfing women generally saw in subcultural revisions of male gender roles an expansion of gender norms related to femininity. Further, alternative subcultural masculinity has always been tied to the production of a rebel girl discourse and to actual rebel girls. That is, the alternative femininity of the surfer girl enabled countermasculinities.
I begin by way of what surfers consider "the scene of the crime," meaning surfing's initial popularization in the late 1950s. I bring critical attention to the Gidget novels and films-fictionalized tales based on the efforts of Kohner ("Gidget") to surf and join the iconic Malibu crew-that initially publicized surfing as lifestyle and identity. Ethnographic materials I have collected from women surfers of this period expand the evidence of surfing's mid-century gender formations. By way of ethnography and of Gidget and its formulation of the beach bum "Kahoona" figure, I then approach subcultural masculinity and its most canonized artifact of alternative masculine purpose: The Endless Summer. My ultimate interest is not (as the Beach Boys sang) "surfing in the U.S.A.," however, but the gender and racial formations generated by the influential local Southern California subcultural scene, their export to other world places, and their eventual evolution into something else, something altered and differently "local" in new locations. In later chapters I consider the political imaginations and social activisms that have emerged by way of this local/global movement. But here I set the stage, detailing the specific problems that would lead to the critical localist consciousness pervasive in local/global surf culture today and into which girl localism offers such an important intervention. These problems have to do with how surfers understood work and history, the kinds of nonacademic educations they valued and pursued, and the everyday culture and social geography of the many relatively sleepy beach towns up and down the coast of Southern California (Malibu being the exception) out of which the global subculture grew.
The Gidget Legacy
Women's history most often tells the story of contemporary women's liberation through "bright and committed" young activists, Freedom Rides to register voters in the American South, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and northeastern feminist "cells" like Redstockings or the Combahee River Collective. Reliable tellers of women's liberation tales will include these political players and events in the overall representation of feminist consciousness, practice, and history. For this chapter, however, we must begin by noticing that the historical memories invoked through such supposedly reliable narratives pose problems for identifying, and understanding, the politics of surfer girls. As the official or most canonized memories of second-wave feminism, they typically do not put us in the mind of the countercultural rebellion happening on the West Coast, a movement with likely several thousand times more members. Nor of top-down radical civil rights reforms enacted by Congress or the Supreme Court, nor, perhaps most unthinkable to veteran civil rights activists then and now, does it speak to the impact of changing images in television and film on viewers' performance of gender, racial, sexual, and class identities. To fathom the story of female liberation told here, we will need to steer clear of a mandate to be committed only to "the bright and committed." By contrast, I imagine rebel female history through the Gidget phenomenon, a televised B-movie and "body phenomenon" that might seem to indicate the height of the nonbright, the noncommitted.
My discussion of Gidget and what clearly are Cold War ideological projects framing her as a female icon and historical figure grows from the recent post-Cold War fascination with surfing that we observe in popular culture in many parts of the world. The hallmark of surfing's global renaissance is often visualized via girls and women; the phenomenon of women in surfing makes news. Women far more often than men appear in newspaper visuals reporting on what's different or interesting, what has changed, or what is possible and should be celebrated. As consumers and influential ideas people, women are seen to have jump-started the renaissance by providing new markets, products, and business leadership. A young women's surf video is local news, women's international surf camps are travel news, women's surf shops sponsoring women's surf films are arts and entertainment news, moms who surf are special interest news, a teenage girl who surfs competitively again after losing a limb to a tiger shark is all-category news. If surfing wants to be part of the current news cycle (and it does), it has found itself invested like never before in recovering and promoting the history of women's surfing. Women's history sells.
In this flurry of media, commercial, and public history activity, Gidget has reentered the American vernacular, appearing in many guises. The first, and continuing, Gidget is not the real life surfer girl of the 1950s, Kathy "Gidget" Kohner Zuckerman, a skiing, tennis-playing, "nice Jewish girl from Brentwood" as she has often been quoted describing herself, who today works as a hostess in a Los Angeles restaurant, but the film character Gidget played by Sandra Dee in 1958 (fig. 9). This cinematic Gidget's adventures were adapted to the screen by the real Gidget's father Frederick Kohner, a Czech Jewish former professor of psychology at the University of Vienna who left Europe for Hollywood as Nazism spread. Kohner became a Hollywood screenwriter and penned this first novel drawing on his daughter's summertime adventures with the legendary all-male Malibu crew of the 1950s. That novel, reissued in 2001 with a foreword by Zuckerman as "the real Gidget herself," initially sold over a million copies and spawned seven additional Gidget novels reprinted in ten languages during the following decade: Cher Papa (1960), Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), Gidget Goes to Rome (1963), The Affairs of Gidget (1963), Gidget In Love (1965), Gidget Goes Parisienne (1966), and concluding with Gidget Goes New York (1968) (fig. 10). Under such titles as "female surf bum," The New York Times, among others, reviewed Gidget favorably.
But in visual culture Gidget left her most lasting cultural imprint. After the monumental success of the first novel and film, the film sequel Gidget Goes Hawaiian followed, which in turn inspired the spate of 1960s Beach Blanket films and fueled the popular musical career of the Beach Boys. On television, ABC debuted the comedy Gidget starring Sally Field in 1965 and tried again in the mid-1980s with The New Gidget. Other Gidget-related cultural productions have appeared over the years, including Gidget the comic book, made-for-TV movies, even a novelistic rant about overcrowded breaks titled Gidget Must Die: A Killer Surf Novel. In 1997 the surfer girl magazine Wahine proclaimed, referring to the novel, "Gidget Turns Forty!" The article also featured a story about Kohner Zuckerman (fig. 11). Also in 1997 Surfer magazine named Gidget the seventh most influential surfer (and the most important woman) in the history of the sport. Kohner Zuckerman herself in 1999 founded a Gidget line of postcards. In 2000 Francis Ford Coppola cowrote Gidget: The Musical, a short-lived but sold-out theatrical production casting mainly unknown actors but including Dermot Mulroney as Kahoona. Coppola hopes to see it produced again (perhaps on Broadway) before making it a film. And of course the original Gidget films continue in frequent reruns on TBS and elsewhere.
The point here is that as an actual person, an iconic figure of popular culture, or as both, Gidget is indexed not just everywhere in surf media but well beyond it, so much so that a 248-page reference book, Cowabunga! Gidget Goes Encyclopedic, appeared in 2001. In discussions of surfing as a subculture or as a metaphor, there is no escaping the Gidget legacy, nor should feminist intellectuals permit themselves to dismiss it or evade its complex implications. "A lot of good came from Gidget" reported Jericho Poppler Bartlow, a cofounder of the Women's International Surfing Association (WISA) and a member of surfing's hall of fame. Debbie Beacham, the 1982 women's surf champion, taught herself to surf after she watched Field as Gidget on television. Matt Warshaw, the most prolific and best of surfing's popular historians, calls Gidget an "Eisenhower-era feminist." And linking the mid-century with more recent surf developments for women, the Gidget encyclopedia begins with the emphatic, "Gidget became a teenage spokesperson for 'women's lib' ... or should that be GIRL POWER!" One teenage girl actually approached Kohner Zuckerman recently, after she had given a talk at the University of California, San Diego, on surf history, to stammer, teary-eyed, "you are my hero."
On the Gidget legacy's moving foundation rests an ideology of female freedom, one based on bodily strength and perseverance, an ability to stand up to male threats, and the joy and power of athletic accomplishments realized in spite of sexist intimidation or distractions. Then and now Gidget as iconography encourages young women to script their bodies according to a narrative of female persistence, courage, and risk-taking. It writes them as subjects rather than objects of California beach stories-a revision of the social geography represented in Tom Keck's widely published photo of Mike Turkington surfing Oahu's west side in 1963 (fig. 12). In Gidget discourse, girls appear in a critical relationship to ideologies of gender and place, evidencing girl localism. Given what feminists know today about the importance of female sport and physical power to women's and girls' sense of competence and their ability to fight for themselves and other women, it should be possible to revisit the Gidget legacy and perceive in it the making of a bohemian female outdoorswoman and, by implication, to appreciate its importance to the history of the women's movement and the radicalization of postwar consciousness about women's social place.
Let me offer here a reading of the first Gidget film, one informed by the early Gidget novels. I work against the scanty critical opinion on the topic, which sees the film as evidence of Cold War normative femininity at its most contained, and none of which either mentions or is interested in the Gidget novel series, actual subcultural life, or the historical young woman who shouldered the popularization. I will focus less on exhaustive readings than on forwarding my argument about the production of subcultural masculinity and its inseparability from the Gidget phenomenon-the emergence of a female rebel girl discourse is one of its crucial conditions of possibility. Moreover, Gidget is as much invested in producing what I see as an Americanized version of male European bohemianism (indebted as we will see to mid-century Beat culture) as it is in representing rebellious female athleticism. Gidget lays out the initial script of subcultural manhood, offers a set of talking points, and forwards a useable masculine past. The Endless Summer will then take what is implicitly the Kahoona type and will retool and systematize him, name his desire "surf surfari," and plot that desire's geographic coordinates along grids that eventuate in an international surfing circuit.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Surfer Girls in the New World Order by Krista Comer Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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