In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers.
Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and...

In Surfer Girls in the New World Order, Krista Comer explores surfing as a local and global subculture, looking at how the culture of surfing has affected and been affected by girls, from baby boomers to members of Generation Y. Her analysis encompasses the dynamics of international surf tourism in Sayulita, Mexico, where foreign women, mostly middle-class Americans, learn to ride the waves at a premier surf camp and local women work as manicurists, maids, waitresses, and store clerks in the burgeoning tourist economy. In recent years, surfistas, Mexican women and girl surfers,...

A history and analysis of the public culture of surfing, especially as it has been inflected by the influx of women surfers in the mid 90s, that assesses the sport's multiple meanings as reality and metaphor in a globalized world.