Flip Skirt Fatales: How Media Fetish Sidelines Cheerleaders

Cheerleading is a highly commodified and mass mediated feminised spectacle which attracts intense vitriol from a range of ostensibly disparate social groups. These include feminists, social conservatives, cultural elites, sports administrators and fans, mainstream media commentators and members of the general public. Complicating these negative framings is the fact that cheerleaders are simultaneously sexually fetishised in pornography, pop culture and the news media. That a relatively unremarkable feminine athletic endeavour provokes such intense cultural anxiety and sexual obsession makes cheerleading a singularly revealing object of study. This article uses textual analysis, and fetish, antifandom, scapegoating and anti-Americanism theory to make sense of the ambivalence, obsession, contradiction, sexualisation and disavowal so often associated with cheerleading. It shows that cheerleading occupies a provocative and liminal cultural status in so far as it has been both stripped yet also hyper-invested with meaning via a range of fetishistic logics. The news media’s obsession (and fetishistic disavowals of its obsession) with cheerleaders reveals the oppressive and disempowering ramifications of contemporary cultural responses to young women whose sexualities are both coveted and despised. It also shows that the critical discourse generated by groups traditionally associated with female oppression and that generated by many feminists can intersect in an ideological pincer movement which leaves young women associated with activities such as cheerleading sidelined and largely without allies.