Krista Comer, Rice University, Houston, Texas

kcomer@ruf.rice.edu

Through photographs, video clips, online websites, magazine documents, and recently collected oral histories, this paper begins the task of formulating the history of women surfers in California. The political investments of the paper are less in history proper, however, than in an analysis of current images of surfing, which are extremely visible in American consumer culture today, and which privilege one version of surf history (the unconsciously colonial Endless Summer version) at the expense of others: those that feature women, male anarchist counterculturalists, and so forth. At stake, I believe, in this struggle over the representation of history, is the larger matter of how "surfing" will come to be popularly and internationally understood--a high stakes battle because the fluidity, timelessness, mobility associated with waveriding has come to articulate not just the process of internet travel or surfing the web, but also the "flow" "circulation" or "surging" of transnational capital itself. That is, surf culture has become a vague but unmistakable point of origins for the new global marketplace and its citizenry. As always, political economy operates by way of gendered, classed and racialized logics. Few domestic markets are as closely monitored by American businesses today as are those commanding large numbers of middle class teenage girls--across race. Girls have every right, advertisers tell them, to nurture their own desires, take seriously their power--and of course, to exercise both, girls should consume. Hence closing thoughts concern the role of gender, especially girl power, in the making of the New World Order and the formation of "global citizens."