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The idea for a course dedicated solely to cheerleaders was a result of the astute observations and critical analyses raised by students in the "Multiethnic Sports Narratives and Race in the Post-Civil Rights Era" freshman seminar here at UCLA. Although cheerleaders were not the explicit focus of the class, our conversation kept drifting toward these figures who were marginal in the various texts that we read (for example, H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights) but who clearly played a pivotal role in the narratives. So when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to devote an entire ten weeks to the icon of cheerleader.
I needed the course as much for personal reasons as for academic ones. When I was in junior high school, I made the cheerleading squad, first as an "alternate"-on standby in case someone dropped from the team-and then, a few weeks later, as the real thing. As is true in most junior high or high schools, a cheerleader held a distinctive but contradictory status among her peers. On the one hand, she embodies the ideas of conventional femininity because she uses her body (voice, hands, legs, hips) to support the team and to encourage the community or the body of fans to do the same. Yet a cheerleader is also not expected to know anything about the sport for which she cheers. Some of us, for example, didn't know what a "first down" is. We often asked each other if our team was on offense or defense now. We couldn't recognize set plays. True fans, like many of our mothers in the bleachers, were knowledgeable and often attempted to call plays from the stands.
In our school, only the coolest, hippest, "flyest" girls made the squad, but I was not a "fly" girl. I was physically stiff, had no identifiable rhythm, and I wore glasses. I found out later that Coach Marsh liked me because I was an honor student and he wanted to overturn the stereotype that cheerleaders were dumb. The fact that I am black only increased my value in his eyes, because in my school to be smart was to be "white" and very, very few white girls became cheerleaders. So there I was, a token Oreo trying to affect...