Abstract
Worldwide, there is growing recognition of the wellbeing benefits of accessing and engaging with healthy blue spaces, especially seas, coasts, and beaches. However, vast gender inequalities persist that impact women’s and girls’ ability to safely access these spaces for recreational benefit. This is even more pronounced in the context of emerging surf cultures in regions such as Southeast Asia. Using a qualitative and reflective approach, this paper explored how safe spaces for female surfers are created, using case studies from two female-focused surfing programs in Sri Lanka. To facilitate a safe space, the multi-layered challenges that female surfers face were analysed. The common mediators that enable females to participate in surfing were then investigated and identified, including: seeing surfing as an option, supportive families and communities, the group factor, free lessons, an all-female environment, culturally appropriate surf apparel, and a safe and playful methodology. This study highlights pathways for how unsafe spaces of exclusion and fear may be transformed into safe spaces of inclusion, healing, and empowerment. These findings have implications for how safe spaces may be facilitated for other organisations, as well as the sustainability of female access to surfing, beyond the life of surfing programs.
Highlights
The past decade has seen a resurgence in women’s and girls’ interest in participating in surfing, along with measures to reduce gender inequalities in the sport, such as pay parity for professional surfers
This section explores the complexities, inequalities, and possibilities for Sri Lankan women and girls to access surfing and illustrates how safe spaces can be facilitated by surfing programs
This study examined how to transform unsafe spaces of exclusion and fear into safe spaces of inclusion, healing, and empowerment, in the context of female-focused surfing programs in Sri Lanka
Summary
The past decade has seen a resurgence in women’s and girls’ interest in participating in surfing, along with measures to reduce gender inequalities in the sport, such as pay parity for professional surfers. Recent trends show increasing participation of female surfers from diverse ethnic backgrounds and social classes, from low-income countries with emerging surf cultures [1], especially in regions of Southeast Asia such as the Maldives, Philippines, India, and Sri Lanka. Surf scholarship for female surfing is on the rise. This research is largely focused on the Global North, within established surf cultures, and is mostly concerned with female representation [2,3]. With a few notable exceptions, very few studies have addressed the experiences of female surfing in the Global South within emerging surf cultures [4–7]. As feminist surf scholars have noted, coasts, beaches, and surfing spaces are constrained by numerous injustices and can be highly exclusionary, especially for female bodies [8–11]
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