On Cheerleading, Fetish and Hate
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Flip-skirt fatales: on cheerleading, fetish and hate Emma Jane / School of the Arts and Media / the University of New South Wales / 2012 2 3 Contents Title page………………………………………………………………………………….1 Originality statement……………………………………………………………………..2 Contents……………………...…………………………………..……….………………3 Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………5 Dedication and acknowledgments……………………………………………...……….6 Introduction…………………………………………………………………...………….8 Foundations, Approach and Methodology………………………………...………15 Locating Cheerleading in Theory………………………………………...………...24 Chapter Outline………………………………………………………...…...……..48 Chapter One: Family Trees and Feminisations…………………………….…………52 Cheerleading Distinctions…………………………………………………………58 Cheerleading as a Cultural Export ……………………………………………...…63 Chapter Two: Fear and Loathing in Discourse………………………………………..70 Part One: Feminism, Gender and Sex – ‘a Barbie Who Puts Out’………………....71 Case Study: Cheerleading Versus Roller Derby……………………………95 Part Two: Sport – ‘Hooliganism… in the Absence of any Soccer’…………...........100 Part Three: Class – Doing ‘for the Ballerina What Velveeta Cheese Spread Did for Brie’……............................................................................................................................................112 Part Four: Anti-Americanism – Cheerleaders and Oxymorons…………………...115 Case Study: Cheerleading in India and China in 2008…………………….120 Chapter Three: A Fetish for Cheerleaders………………………...…………………..129 Part One: Pornography…………………………………………………………..133 Part Two: Popular Culture……………………………………………………….144 4 Part Three: The News Media………………………………………………….…148 Case Study: Jennifer’s Body…………………………………………...…….176 Chapter Four: A Fetish for Vitriol..............................................................................183 Chapter Five: Resistance, Subversion and Aufhebung...............................................205 Subversion and Alternative Appreciators........................................................................208 What Cheerleading Means to Cheerleaders.....................................................................217 Protesting Too Much and Aufhebung................................................................................223 Case Study: Bring It On..........................................................................................225 Case Study: Glee......................................................................................................228 Conclusion..................................................................................................................236 Bibliography...............................................................................................................251 5 Abstract Cheerleading – an activity with origins in the elite, male-dominated domain of the late 19th century American university campus – 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 – under what I will unpack as a conceptual framework I nominate as fetish theory – 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). This thesis examines the role of feminist discourse (particularly in relation to its convergence with social conservative rhetoric) in censuring young women involved in sexualised performances such as cheerleading. It interrogates the relevance of traditional media studies models such as moral panic; problematises orthodox understandings of the progressive/transgressive politics involved in active audienceship and self-publishing; explicates some of the dangers of celebratory rhetoric framing new media ecosystems; and probes the usefulness of new approaches to explicating power flows in media environments. Key words: Cheerleading, fetish, scapegoating, antilocution, hate speech, new media, power, hegemony, feminism, sport. 6 DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For my daughter, Alice, who came into being at almost exactly the same time as this thesis. In different ways, this dissertation is the story of both our lives. Engaging in any act of prolonged education – let alone a PhD thesis – while in the throes of biological reproduction can feel like an act of profound masochism. There were times over the past five years when juggling work, study and small human-care felt like an impossibility; when the relentless grind of research felt disproportionate to the euphoria of discovery. I was sustained, however, by the love and support of my friends and family (particularly those who cared for my daughter, Alice, while I retreated to a room of my own), as well as by the extraordinary generosity shown to me by my formal and informal academic mentors. Huge gratitude: to the lovely Chris Fleming (for sharing his staggering intellect and polymathic pom-pom-ing); to my mother, Helen Corben (for typing when I was no longer able); to my supervisor, Catharine Lumby (for the superlative support and academic orienteering); to my co-supervisor, Katherine Albury (for introducing me to the delights of antifandom and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick); to my initial co-supervisor, Kate Crawford (for suggesting that moral panic might require a rethink); to John Hartley (for inspiration and assistance above and beyond); to Alan McKee (for being so intellectually buff); and to Michael Pusey (for the generous read-through and delightfully illustrated margin notes). Special thanks also to: Marie-Pierre Cleret; Christy Collis; Nerine Cooper; Milissa Deitz; Kat Costigan; Penny Elliott; Clifton Evers; Anne Fawcett; Nina Funnell; Gerard Goggin; David McKnight; Brendon O’Connor; Ruth McCausland; Alan Ramsay; Rachael Swaine; Alanna Tabone; Brigitte Tabone; Justin Tabone; and Laura Tolton. I am most fortunate to have received funding for this research in the form of an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) from 2009 until 2011. This work was also greatly assisted by the funding I received to attend the ANZCA Post-Graduate Mentoring Workshop at the Queensland University of Technology in July 2009. The latter led to the publication of a 7 section of this thesis in journal form in the 2010 ANZCA edition of PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication (Tom 2010a). I am enormously appreciative of the support provided by the University of Sydney – where I started this thesis, and the University of New South Wales – where I completed it. Much appreciation, also, to the Journalism and Media Research Centre (JMRC) at the University of New South Wales, and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI). 8 INTRODUCTION Marty Beckerman is an American humour writer whose professions of an all-encompassing contempt for cheerleading have become a lynchpin of his career. Notorious for asking a 13- year-old female cheerleader how it felt to be ‘a urine stain on the toilet seat of America’ (cited in Traister 2002), he is the author of a collection of journalistic non-fiction called Death to all Cheerleaders – One Adolescent Journalist’s Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity in which he dismisses cheerleaders as a ‘race of loose bimbos with the brain capacity of squirrel faeces’ (2000, p. 43). In 2006, he told the Guardian newspaper: If a daughter of mine wanted to be a cheerleader I would boil her alive. But not ‘till I killed her, just until I killed her dreams. But if it was my son I’d drag him behind my truck ‘till he died (cited in Wells 2006). It is telling that, despite deriding the female high school cheerleaders he interviews for his book, Beckerman still expresses an interest in having sexual relations with them. ‘I wonder if I can nail that dumb bitch,’ he ruminates about one (2000, p. 43). Similar sexualised vitriol directed at cheerleaders exists on the Nothing Toxic web site – a cyber hub billing itself as specialising in ‘funny’, ‘extreme’ and ‘cool’ videos (Nothing Toxic). On January 14, 2008, Nothing Toxic posted a clip of what appears to be a high school cheerleader falling from a human pyramid during a public performance. The accompanying text reads: ‘Cheerleader Falls on her Face in Front of the School. Watch the two girls in the audience give each other five when the slut falls on her face.’ The clip: is brief (49 seconds including a slow-motion replay); is of poor visual quality; and depicts a relatively minor sporting mishap. It is, nevertheless, given an