AustLit

'This article seeks to examine and analyse the manner in which three coming-of-age or rites-of-passage films - Gidget (1959), Puberty Blues (1981) and Blue Crush (2002) - seek to portray the relationship between female adolescence and surfing. In a sport that remains predominantly white, middle class and male - recreationally, professionally and in its key representations - these three films provide historians and cultural analysts with a suitable terrain to explore that relationship through focusing a lens on the interaction between content and context. Surfing's relationship to sex and gender appears to crash on to the shore of popular culture in waves of inconsistency, contradiction and extremes. Scholarly issues, female adolescence, patriarchal anxiety and the shifting significance of the surfing lifestyle.' (Paul Scott).