Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Mazer, Sharon

Titel

Cheerleaders in the popular (American) imagination

Ist Teil von

• Performance in Popular Culture, 2024, p.155-166

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Cheerleading is a genre of performance that is composed of diverse practices: promenade and pageant; dance, chant and song; acrobatic art and gymnastic sport. These days, cheerleading has become a sport in itself, while the performance of cheerleading is a staple of popular entertainment. Having originated as a male-centred salute to the male-dominated world of sport, the female cheerleader has come to command the popular imagination. As exemplified by the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, the figure of the girl with pom poms is at once archetypal, stereotypical and iconic. Cheerleaders are everywhere in American culture: on television in shows like Glee, Friends and Will & Grace; in the docuseries Cheer; in the Bring It On films and in American Beauty. Parodies abound, for example, whether conventionally, as in South Park and on The Simpsons, or queerly, as in But I'm a Cheerleader. As a staple of pornography, cheerleading reveals the fundamental(ist) sexism in the way young women are made (and seen) to perform, as for example, in The Cheerleaders and Debbie Does Dallas - and (perhaps more benignly) in Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical. That the cliché can be turned against the status quo, though, can be seen in the Radical Cheerleader movement.