237
“In the history of surfing, two such ‘takeovers’ figure prominently: the first signaled in the late 1950 to mid 1960s by the litereary sensation turned mass cultural icon ‘gidget’; the second by what we might think of as the arrival of girl power in surf communities in the mid-1990s.’
238
‘If the Gidget phenomenon generated subcultural foreboding about the potential costs to surf culture of its own newfound popularity, it also generated a host of creative and financial possibilites which, as they were explored and realized over the next two decades, financed many a surfer’s primary desire: to be in the water for hours on end. Whether it was working in the movie business as a stunt surfer, founding magazines and making films that told the story of how mass culture got surfing all wrong, or providing equipment and information to the subculture’s expanding commercial base, many of the era’s best known surfers got in on the ground floor of the popularization process and rode it to places that nobody imagined surfing, or a surfer would go.’
‘During the early cold war period, mass culture’s representations of beachy California youth served to school baby boomer adolescents in the how to’s of living the postwar good life: conformity, consumerism, mobility and WASPy niceness equaled ‘decent’ American youth. When the subculture ‘wrote back’ after Gidget to say that mass culture had sugarcoated and, in effect, feminised surfing, it countered with images of surfers as rebelliously masculine, sensual, anti materialist social drop outs- not a discourse about American youth as readily adaptive to cold war national alert. It is this tension between mass cultural and subcultural ‘ownership’ of surfing narratives that, in fact enabled the subculture over the next three decades to produce itself as a viable alternative public culture, eventually a functioning and very masculinist counter-culture.’
Outlaw surf culture is sexy and bohemian.
‘in an age of popular panics about self-loathing ‘Ophelias’ and competitive ‘queen bees,’ the new surfergil’s mental health appears stable and secure, guaranteed by sports activities…keeps intact her feminity, meaning she does not denounce her ‘girl-ness’ and , in effect, insists that girl-ness be valued be valued, taken seriously.’
242
Desirous of importing more females into the ranks of surfing amenable already (a legacy of Gidget) to the playfulness of girl cultures, women surfers/ business owners made it a central goal to recruit girls into male-dominated surf communities.
259
The gidget phenomenon includes 6 gidget novels, appearing between 1957 and 1968, some selling over a million copies, and reprinted in 10 languages, the Gidget films 1958-1963. As well as the dozens of beach blanket films spawned by gidget, and the tv series gidget. The most sustained commentary on this cultural trend is to be found in Kirse Granat May 2002. Historical figure Kathy Kohner upon whom gidget was based.
Contemporary society, a new market for surf stories.
Hollywood creating consumer item out of subcutlture.
Can include 3 or 4 images. Introduction. State the obvious. Reference images. Have a conclusion at the end, to wrap everything up. Make it engaging. Really hone things down to concise statements.
Ideas to explore:
rise of youth consumption. Middle class. Gender wise. Embodied… women physical. More child like. Gidget. Constructed image for a market, and for a type of consumption.
No comments:
Post a Comment