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The 'Other' Surfer.
Clifton Evers, Griffith University, Gold Coast Campus
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Surfing is an exemplary cult of male physicality which uses force, intensities and skill to establish power relations in and around the surf and surfer’s body. Elspeth Probyn argues that "aspects of sport challenge certain tendencies within theories of the body…sport reaches parts of the body that analyses of embodiment have shied away from." (Body and Society, 00: 13) I would like to propose that the surfer’s elaborates connections between the visceral capacities of the body and its relations e.g. sexuality and shame. I will investigate bodily comportment explaining how my version of surfing and my surfer body, through a patriarchal structure, establishes particular visceral capacities and relations of the male body in surfing at the expense of ‘other’ surfing. This will be accomplished through a narrative regarding my progression through ‘grommethood’ to a ‘waterman’. I see a necessity to renew attention to the connections and dis-connections that the body may perform.
Questions broached will include: By what means is a young boy made a surfer? How does he become the surfing figure? How does his body attain its final form, what are its functions, how does the "whole" man who wears it function? Who and what is the ‘becoming surfer’? My body has been determined and has contributed to my being a surfer, a male surfer. Did that boy become a man? Or a surfer? Or a surfer man? Or a particular conception of a surfer man? The soft white flesh of my youth was transformed and led to its own transformation.
