Becoming visible: visual narratives of ‘female’ as a political position in surfing: the history, perpetuation, and disruption of patriocolonial pedagogies?

How is sex/gender/sexuality (sgs) employed through practices of recognition, legitimation, and positioning in surfing to constitute learning one’s body, one’s habitus, one’s positioning as particular bodies in a social field such as surfing? How does visuality, in the form of presence, perceived presence, and visual imagery (art, cartoons, photography, film) act as a pedagogical device of possibility, mediated by the pedagogical work of surfing and its media, to facilitate learning who one is and where one is positioned in relation to others in the field? I argue that qualities that constitute the pedagogical force of who/what could be recognized and legitimated as ‘surfer’ are embedded in politics of sgs based upon the taken-for-granted presuppositions, or doxa, of patriocolonial (hetero)normative supremacy and hegemony. Not only does this pedagogical force circumscribe what narratives we have to live by but also acts as an instrument of censorship against new narrative visions of surfing, different ways of knowing surfing, re-membering who and what constitutes/ed surfing, and recognizing those who contest surfing through their non-normative surfing bodies. This chapter discusses the pedagogy of visibility, including that contained in artefacts; of the image as a powerful mechanism for controlling female access to the waves, as a way for legitimating her as an athletic participant, and through recognition as a valued contributor constituting the surfing field.