Publication:
Flip-skirt fatales: on cheerleading, fetish and hate

dc.contributor.advisor Lumby, Catharine en_US
dc.contributor.advisor Albury, Kath en_US
dc.contributor.author Jane, Emma en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2022-03-21T10:35:26Z
dc.date.available 2022-03-21T10:35:26Z
dc.date.issued 2012 en_US
dc.description.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 hyperinvested 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. en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/51583
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.publisher UNSW, Sydney en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.subject.other Scapegoating en_US
dc.subject.other Cheerleading en_US
dc.subject.other Fetish en_US
dc.subject.other Antilocution en_US
dc.subject.other Hate speech en_US
dc.subject.other New media en_US
dc.subject.other Power en_US
dc.subject.other Hegemony en_US
dc.subject.other Feminism en_US
dc.subject.other Sport en_US
dc.title Flip-skirt fatales: on cheerleading, fetish and hate en_US
dc.type Thesis en_US
dcterms.accessRights open access
dcterms.rightsHolder Jane, Emma
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri https://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
unsw.identifier.doi https://doi.org/10.26190/unsworks/15207
unsw.relation.faculty Arts Design & Architecture
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Jane, Emma, Media & Communications, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Lumby, Catharine, Journalism & Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Albury, Kath, Journalism & Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW en_US
unsw.relation.school School of the Arts & Media *
unsw.thesis.degreetype PhD Doctorate en_US
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