Surfing, Sex, Genders and Sexualities by lisahunter

Author:lisahunter [lisahunter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367895747
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 48635338
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chris expressed to me he wasn’t offended by his former coach’s comment, but it vexed him to be put into a category and to be warned or told not to participant in a sport that’s socially not associated with people of color. Instead of allowing racial microaggressions to deter him from participating in the sport he in turn challenged and redefined cultural assumptions about Mexican Americans. He views racial insults as an opportunity to “prove people wrong and show them Mexican Americans do surf and I’m proof of that”. Most participants, male and female, viewed racial microaggressions opportunistically as well as transformative. For Jennifer, struggling with her intersecting identities as a Chicana surfer raised by immigrant parents, she wants to share her experiences with inner city kids because she feels as if “I can become their bridge into this foreign world of surfing”. By deconstructing racialized discourses about sporting bodies, both participants are directly challenging dominant cultural beliefs about lifestyle sports and whiteness.

These brief, but insightful commentary begins the process of understanding how Mexican American’s might use sport as a tool for assimilation, how they negotiate and navigate the racialized and gendered landscapes of their everyday sporting experiences, the ways in which they break out of and challenge existing cultural barriers that might prevent people of color from pursuing surfing in the first place. Current literature suggests Latina/os experience discrimination to a similar degree as other racial or ethnic groups (Gee, Ryan, Laflamme, & Holt 2006; LaVeist, Rolley, & Diala, 2003; Stuber, Galea, Ahern, Blaney, & Fuller, 2003) with many of them facing barriers in the workforce, education and neighborhoods (Ko & Perreira, 2010). By analyzing how Mexican Americans might cope with discrimination in predominantly white, male, able-bodied sporting spaces, it will provide researchers with the tools to dismantle why the sport of surfing continues to be culturally imagined as a white space. So far, a few Mexican American participants recalled experiencing racial microaggressions while out in the line-up, but most mentioned the impact of growing up in working-class neighborhoods, having limited access to resources, being a child of immigrant parents, and growing up with limited leisure time due to economic constraints as the reasons why they did not pursue surfing until later in their lives. Female participant’s experiences were furthered complicated by dominant cultural beliefs about gender and sporting bodies. Specifically for women of color, they felt doubly bound by both gender and race-related cultural assumptions, whereas non-Hispanic participants reported only experiencing sexism out in the line-up. These intersecting factors shaped Mexican American’s perceptions of participating in a sport they never believed “was for Mexicans”. Participants narratives are filled with stories of overcoming adversity and applying cultural knowledge they gained from participating in other predominantly white spaces to combat insecurities they felt while pursuing surfing.

As surfing continues to grow in popularity and spread across the globe, it continues to be an important sporting space for sociological analyses of gender, race, class, sex, and sexuality relations. It also constitutes a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.