To browse Academia. Cheerleading β an activity with origins in the elite, male-dominated domain of the late 19th century American university campus β is now 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.
Engaging with media, feminist, gender, sporting and cultural studies theory β under what I will unpack as a conceptual framework I nominate as fetish theory β this thesis conducts an extensive analysis of media texts framing cheerleading.
It shows that cheerleading animates intense cultural anxieties because it is seen to threaten a broad spectrum of ideologies and ideals, which range across theory, practice and views as diverse as feminism, moral conservatism, sport, and cultural authenticity. As a result, cheerleaders: are the subject of intense desire and loathing; are used as multi-purpose, psycho-social scapegoats; and have come to occupy a provocative liminal space between the sex worker and the athlete in part because they have been both stripped yet also hyper-invested with meaning via a range of fetishistic logics.
