Feminist Kitchen Sink
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Feminist
Kitchen Sink |
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by Anne Moore
One
of my clearest Christmas memories is the year I got the Dallas Cowgirl
outfit: blue and silver pompoms, a white miniskirt with blue and silver
piping, and a white cowboy hat with blue trim. I was five, I think, and
knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: either a movie star or a Dallas
Cowgirl. Since I didn't understand football at all (and still don't),
my cheering proclivities didn't come from actually watching the Cowgirls,
but the pretty outfits and social status were enough to cement in my mind
what I wanted to do. My mom taught me cheers from her high school ("Time
for a Touchdown," for instance), and I really liked jumping up and
down and yelling. I was ready!
In eighth grade my friend Sheila Perhus
and I would practice on the bus, but when I entered high school, something
shifted. It wasn't just that I was too fat and uncoordinated to make it
on the team, but an unspoken rift had opened between my Cure-listening,
Dungeons and Dragons-playing, dorked-out friends and the glossy-haired
Skipperettes (the dance squad at my high school). Although I still longed
for the approval of those popular kids in a corner of my heart, I had
made a kind of political decision, based on both ability and belief, not
to go the traditional girl-route. I could never get my bangs to stand
up the way theirs did even when I tried, but I soon became unwilling to
try at all.
But the thing is, I still really like to
jump up and down and yell. I don’t like playing sports, but I like
competition a lot, and those pleated cheerleading skirts are freaking
nice. In college, I reconnected to my desire to "support the team"
through campus activism, especially leading marches and rallies at Middlebury.
Ultimately, it wasn't that different from what had appealed to me about
cheerleading from the beginning - I was still getting to yell a lot, lead
call-and-response exchanges, and be the center of attention, but now it
was for things I actually cared about.
The first time I saw any radical cheerleaders
was at a Youth Pride rally in Montpelier in about 2000. Three women from
Bread and Puppet had on matching red and black outfits. They were without
a doubt the coolest girls at the parade - but not in the mean, exclusive
way that the cheerleaders in high school were cool. These were the girls
on the quiz bowl team with me, with whom I skipped the prom to do graffiti,
and on whom I nursed awkward, inarticulate crushes. Their cheers were
about fucking off dieting and resisting global capitalism. I had that
same desire for emulation that I'd felt for the Dallas Cowgirls, but it
felt more meaningful and less creepy.
When I first became a feminist, so many
of the actions I took were in direct reaction against the things that
had driven me crazy in high school - I stopped wearing uncomfortable clothes,
stopped spending thirty minutes putting on makeup in the morning, started
eating whatever I wanted. I stopped constructing myself so I could get
the boyfriend I thought my parents wanted me to have. But with that transformation
came this terrible loathing of the person I had been before. I just felt
like I had been such a dupe, wanting these things that were so stupid,
like being a cheerleader or having a popular boyfriend. I wanted to move
forward, leaving my former self behind me as a husk to dry in the sun.
With radical cheerleading, though, I can
take this thing I wanted as a kid and change it so that it actually is
what I always wanted. Nobody is too fat or dorky to cheer, and being fat
and dorky just makes the whole thing sexier, for both spectator and cheerleader.
Although there are aspects of cheering that are (gloriously) like the
movie Bring It On, we never suffer any drama over stealing cheers
or anything like that - squads from all over the country post cheers they
write on a web site for anyone to access and borrow, and our squad (the
Burlington radical cheerleaders) writes all our cheers collaboratively.
In my day-to-day life, I sometimes feel
conflicted about whether I am really "reclaiming" things like
skirts and makeup or if I'm just bullshitting myself into finding new
and exciting ways to participate in my own oppression. Marching in the
Pride parade this year with my homemade pleated mini and garbage-bag pompoms,
however, felt like freedom. No no-neck boys to cheer, just my own community
of weirdos. Yay!
Anne Moore lives in Burlington with her cat and her morbid Buffy the
Vampire Slayer obsession.