My girl Kate has a blue streak in her hair. She digs obscure music and was raised by a feminist historian. She's a vegetarian with a yoga teaching dad. Oh, and she wrote a badass book on the subculture of competitive college cheerleading.
A total contrast, I know, but that's why her new book, CHEER!, is so cool. Kate is a journalist fascinated in all the ins and outs of how people become obsessed with sports and identified with the cultures surrounding them. When she first did some reporting on college cheerleading for Jane Magazine, where she was working at the time, she didn't expect to be too drawn in. And then she started to get to know the fearless women and men involved, she started to see that cheerleading was far from rah-rah siskomba and all the other stereotypes. It was leaping thirty feet in the air, concussions, and almost bizarre dedication.
In CHEER! she follows three teams through out the year on their way to Nationals, the Super Bowl of cheerleading. She eats in diners with them, sits in the hospital with them, parties with them, and, of course, watches a lot of frickin' cheerleading. In the process drugs, race, eating disorders, class, and a host of other issues come up.
Kate creates fascinating, empathy-inducing portraits of this culture and each of its characters. If only we were all so curious about the world and so passionate towards other people. Check out Kate on Good Morning America below:
Next week Oprah and I are taking a little break, but I'll be back the week after with something thrilling.
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I am excited to read this since it hopefully will not come from an unbiased source like Alexandra Robbins "Pledged"
As a feminist and a sorority girl (albeit at a small private midwest university) I hated the way she colored everything to make it the sororities fault...even to the point when , after one sisters boyfriend flew off the handle and was violent, she felt the sorority was at fault for banning him from the house
I'm definitely going to check this out. I always was intrigued by the whole cheerleading lifestyle & how much people dedicate to it. Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until summer to read it though, as sociology text books & readers are currently taking up all of my time.
As a former high school cheerleader striving, time and again, to prove Kate's point that cheerleading is an intense sport, I'm happy to see that this information is now available and is taken seriously. In the clip the interviewer names cheerleading as the only sport for women that combines femininity and athleticism, but I want to expand this to include roller derby. Derby has been around for decades and is currently experiencing a modern resurgence, which highlights aspects of the traditionally feminine with the extreme athleticism of roller skating and body checking. In the current form of roller derby, all types of women are encouraged to participate and can put a spin on their own derby persona by wearing fishnets, short skirts, camo shorts, face paint, or all of it. The sport itself is focused on sisterhood and teamwork, so for me, roller derby was only the natural progression from cheerleading...especially since there aren't many sports open to the beautifully diverse forms of female expression that are out there.
*Fantastic* Sounds like a great book! :)
I'm reminded a bit of this article on a group of senior-year rugby players at the end of the season sad to end their college rugby days and cheering up by joining the cheerleading team:
http://www.boston.com/lifestyle/articles/2008/03/14/the_flip_floppers/
"...Belden has told the guys - only partially in jest - to make it mandatory for senior rugby players to join the cheer squad in the second semester..."