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Description
"The girls are as surfing is—not to be analyzed, but to be enjoyed," wrote the associate editor of Surfer Magazine in 1966. This dismissive attitude exemplified male views towards surfing women in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. These decades were a period of intense debate about the presence of women surfers within the culture. Through surf magazines, women participated in the subculture while facing discrimination from their male counterparts. This study argues that magazines like Surfer Magazine presented contradictory views of women's participation in surf culture in 1960-70s Southern California. While casually printing images and stories of individual women who surfed, they also repeated and enforced damaging gender stereotypes about the proper behavior and appearance for women. Within this male-dominated medium, women expressed dissatisfaction with and contested their subordinate position through writing and interviews. Women surfers in the 1960s and 70s found themselves in a liminal space between begrudging acceptance and outright hostility and fought for a space for themselves built on mutual respect. In the study, where and how women are (or are not) placed in letters, images, and articles in Surfer Magazine during the 1960s and 1970s is deconstructed using a combination of visual analysis, textual analysis, and post-structuralism. These methods are also used to analyze and understand how female surfers saw themselves and fought the often misogynistic representations of women in the magazine. The 1960s and 70s were years of cultural and political change and turmoil in the United States. Surfing intersected with many of these issues, including civil rights, the antiwar movement, and counterculture. Gender relations proved no different. In an attempt to reconcile rapidly changing ideas of women's place in society with established stereotypes and behaviors, Surfer Magazine portrayed women in complex and contradictory ways.
