Commanding the room in short skirts: Cheering as the embodiment of ideal girlhood

Abstract

More than 3.5 million people participate in cheerleading in the United States, with 97 percent being female. A staple of American schools, American life, and popular culture, the cheerleader, however, has received scant attention in scholarly research. In this article, the authors argue that a feminist poststructuratist reading of cheerleading situates cheerleading as a discursive practice that has changed significantly in the past 150 years to accommodate the shifting and often contradictory meanings of normative femininity. They maintain that the ideal girl of the new millennium embodies both masculinity and femininity and that cheerleading offers a culturally sanctioned space for some girls to embody ideal girlhood. They argue that cheerleading is a gendered activity representing in some ways a liberatory shift in reconstituting normative femininity while simultaneously perpetuating a norm offemininity that does not threaten dominant social values and expectations about the role of girls and women in society.