“We're Leading America”: The Changing Organization and Form of High School Cheerleading

Abstract

This essay examines the “professionalization” of high school cheerleading, a movement spawned by national cheerleading organizations whose rhetoric emphasizes cheerleaders' enhanced status and skill. An investigation of one national organization's impact on cheerleaders in a southern high school shows that increased status and skill included a bureaucratization of cheerleading and greater control by the national organization. The selection of cheerleaders was no longer made by students and teachers, but by outside experts according to objective, skill-based standards which ignored the relation of the cheerleaders to the student body. Associated with this rationalization of the selection, was a distinctive style of cheering that emphasized straight, clipped movements executed with great speed and precision, like a military drill team. Thus, the announced higher status and skill of cheerleaders is associated with the loss of popular selection, centralization of standards, and tighter control of the body. The rhetoric of increased status, or professionalization, for high school cheerleaders is accompanied by the usurpation of control by a technical, bureaucratic rationality of experts.