Paper short abstract:

This paper will consider the way that modern surf culture, in many ways a particularly hypermasculine enterprise, provides an avenue for local Philippine surfers to contest colonial and touristic processes of feminisation and marginalisation.

Paper long abstract:

Cloud 9 is a challenging and increasingly popular surfbreak located off an island in central Philippines. The early 1990s saw Australian and American surf tourists begin travelling to the remote island to surf this wave, kicking-off what was to become, by 2016, a highly-centralised, vibrant and burgeoning surf tourism destination complete with an eclectic Western lifestyle migrant community, increasing numbers of domestic and foreign tourist arrivals, and a flourishing local surf community. In post-colonial contexts of tropical tourism, such the Philippines, colonial/touristic processes of feminisation work to emasculate or render invisible local male populations, while concurrently imagining local women as hypersexual yet passive 'objects' for the visual pleasure or 'consumption' of tourists. This paper will consider the way that modern surf culture, in many ways a particularly hypermasculine enterprise, provides an avenue for local male surfers to contest colonial and touristic processes of feminisation and marginalisation. Rejection of passive, subservient 'feminine' roles is not, however, limited to Philippine men: Filipinas who surf constitute changing gender norms in local society, as they too exhibit 'masculine' characteristics through dominant, active and engaged behaviours in the surf zone.