The sparkly pink nail color wasn't my style and wasn't an accurate reflection of my taste and personality, but I also knew that it was the default for a girl, and I did not want to be a standard girl. I was embarrassed that my nails were indicating to everyone around me that my femininity was the regular kind. The sparkly pink nails did not belong on my hands; they belonged on the hands of a girl who wore bows and frills and did cheerleading. I was fearful and almost repulsed by that kind of femininity.
I cannot identify a source, but I picked up from somewhere that bows, frills, cheerleading, and the color pink were all to be avoided, and nobody swooped in to tell me otherwise. This continued into high school, when I witnessed my peers making fun of traditionally feminine fashion and activities, including cheerleading. Basically everyone I knew made fun of cheerleading, and I struggle to explain why, aside from the obvious misogyny. There is nothing objectively wrong with clapping, chanting, and executing choreography.
Generally, people believe that cheerleading is ornamental and frivolous. (People have trouble remembering that all sports are frivolous.) Cheerleading occurs on the literal margins of the game, and given its role and reputation as "the sport that girls do," this is sadly appropriate. It makes a lot of sense for a marginalized group of people to do their sport in the margins of the main attraction. But what if cheerleading were the main attraction? What if femininity were at the center? What if sparkly pink nails were universally celebrated? This concept is at the core of the Netflix documentary series Cheer, which follows the elite cheer team at Navarro College in Texas.
Throughout the six-episode season, we see the team accomplish seemingly impossible feats of athleticism as they prepare for the National Cheerleaders Association College Nationals in Daytona Beach, Florida. We also get to know some of the team members, complete with visits to their childhood homes and interviews with their closest family members. And of course, given the genre, there are talking heads who provide a historical and cultural framework for everything we see on the show. All of these people, from the talking heads to the coaches to the team members, know that the general population does not care about cheerleading. They know where they stand, but in their world, cheerleading matters. As a result, femininity is at the center of their world and the world of the show, and Cheer provides rich commentary on it. Cheer embraces femininity, subverts traditional understandings of it, and shows the harm that comes with restricting access to it.
From the beginning, Cheer makes it clear that cheerleading is far more hardcore than it is perceived. When it comes to competitive cheerleading, the top teams are always advancing the sport and executing increasingly more difficult, and more dangerous, routines. Throughout the season, we witness the Navarro squad, under the leadership of ruthless Coach Monica Aldama, perfect their Daytona routine, including an innovative and intricate pyramid that they practice over and over until it is perfect. Team members get tossed into the air, and if everything goes as planned, they land on the shoulders or in the hands of their teammates and add a leg extension or sassy hand-on-hip for presentation. It seems unlikely that the team members will make it out of this choreography alive, let alone with pizzaz, but they pull it off by the time Daytona rolls around.
Their success is not without sacrifice. Throughout the season, we see a stunter, TT, practice through a thrown-out back. His job is to stand on the ground and throw, hold up, and catch the others. He fights through the pain and never drops his teammates during practice, but we see him keel over and cry during breaks. We also witness one of the flyers, Morgan, practice through the pain of cracked ribs. She has to perfect a piece of choreography where she gets throw into the air, flips around a bunch of times, and gets caught, face down, in the arms of her teammates. Her ribs get injured from the trauma. And the most gruesome injury of the season occurs during pyramid practice, when Sherbs, a top girl (the cheerleading term for a girl at the top of the pose), gets thrown into the air, and when nobody shows up to catch her, she dislocates her elbow. Sherbs is such a valuable member of the team that her injury turns into a crisis for everyone.
Throughout the season, we come to understand the physical demands of this sport and the risk involved in participating. When you put aside the fact that these kids need a goddamn break and need to take care of themselves before their bodies fall apart, this is a thrilling subversion of the norm. Cheerleading is supposed to be feminine. It is supposed to be soft, unassuming, and low-risk. It is supposed to be for the weaker sex. Not on Cheer. By the end of the season, you cannot possibly dismiss or disrespect the sport of cheerleading, and you cannot possibly think that women are physically weak.
In addition to the aforementioned injuries, we also witness moments of triumph as the team flawlessly executes fast-paced choreography that you would not think is physically possible. While the men complete their tumbling and stunting effectively and are clearly wonderful at what they do, the women are the ones who shine the most. Jade, a flyer, reliably hits all of her stunts every time she gets on the mat. At every practice, team member Lexi completes challenging tumbling passes with what seems like a minimal amount of effort. Morgan masters choreography that nobody, including the coach, knew she could do. The Navarro College women display their strength, power, and resilience in nearly every scene. Not to get all "backwards and in heels" on you, but the women are essential to this team's success, and they do it all with a giant bow on their head, an entire container of hairspray in their hair, tons of makeup on their face, and a tiny costume on their body.
In some clips, you see them sitting at home in front of the mirror, applying makeup before a performance. You see them doing each other's hair. You even hear them complaining about how inequitable it is that their male teammates take so much less time to get ready for a performance. In most other clips, you see them kicking butt on the mat, impressing their teammates with tumbling passes, and seeing how many times they can spin their body through the air after being tossed up. The juxtaposition between their at-home preparation, in which they use traditionally feminine skills to attain a traditionally feminine appearance, and their on-mat mastery, in which they display their physical strength, is striking. But maybe it's not a juxtaposition. Maybe this show is trying to get us to interpret sparkles, sequins, and bows as representations of toughness.
While we might never see true equality when it comes to getting ready, we continue to see a subversion of gender norms when it comes to the men on the team, who hug, hold hands, and say "I love you" and "I'm so proud of you" to their teammates. They even cry sometimes. They are more in touch with their feelings than at least 80% of the American male population, and they are a goddamn delight! No matter how you look at it, cheer is not a traditionally masculine sport, so the boys who pursue it are inherently norm-disrupting. They know that they are different from other boys, and they have the courage to act on it.
One of the stories that moved me the most was that of La'Darius, a talented tumbler who was bullied growing up and was called gay before he used the term himself. In one of his interviews, he talks about how he showed great promise as a football player but only wanted to do cheer, so he started tagging along with his cousin to her cheer practices. Eventually, he quit football and started cheering officially, and his immediate family was not supportive. His participation in cheerleading intensified an already-developing rift between him and his brothers, one of whom is interviewed on the show.
It is clear that his decision to join cheerleading took courage, but it was so natural for him that it was almost inevitable. It would have taken more effort for him to stifle his personality, even though he endured abuse when he began to express it. Now, cheer is a safe place for him to showcase his talents while expressing his personality and identity. While he would have been an excellent football player, that did not feel right. It was not motivating to him. Cheer, however, was the right outlet for his power, athleticism, and sense of playfulness. (Despite the intensity of the physical demands, you can tell that this kid is having a good time.)
 |
| La'Darius, wearing an orange tank top, practices with his teammates. |
He seems at home on the mat and with his teammates in the dorms. There is one scene where he puts on a pink wig, pretends to be Nicki Minaj, and struts around the room while his teammates enjoy the performance. He has the personality of an entertainer (at one point, his coach calls it "over-the-top") and is ready to express it at any moment. However, it is clear that he does not get to do this without a cost. La'Darius's participation in cheerleading isolated him from his family.
Cheer also features families who are 100% supportive of boys who participate in cheerleading. Jerry, one of the other team members heavily featured, experienced nothing but support from those around him growing up. When he showed interest in cheer, his mother helped him get involved and supported him the whole way through. While I love La'Darius and have endless compassion for him, he is not the greatest teammate. His baggage ends up rearing its ugly head at inopportune moments: he gets frustrated easily, lashes out at teammates, and sometimes does not try his best. Jerry, however, is an excellent teammate: he works hard, collaborates well with others, deals with disappointment in a mature way, and always encourages his teammates with the best mat talk. While Jerry has trauma of his own, his supportive and open-minded upbringing surely contributed to his positive attitude and demeanor.
La'Darius's background is complicated. He shares that his mother was incarcerated throughout some of his childhood, and he tells us about the kind of toughness and aggressiveness that was expected of men in his community. Given that context, it makes sense that he faced backlash for joining cheer, but it is still frustrating. There is nothing objectively wrong with cheer, but it is absolutely loaded with connotations of femininity, and that's what's wrong with it.
I wish we could neutralize gender. I wish we could take a gender neutralizer gun, fire it at football and cheerleading, and come out the other side with the objective facts of each sport. Cheerleading is a sport where people throw their teammates into the air. Football is a sport where people score points by throwing the ball into the end zone.
The closest thing we have to a gender neutralizer gun is the media. The very source of many of these gender-based limitations is the weapon we have to wipe them out. Cheer is such a noteworthy show because it (hopefully) indicates that the media is headed in that direction and is going to undo some of the harm it has caused.
In the Corsicana Tumbling Athletics facilities, where the Navarro team practices, there is a mural of a female cheerleader. It is just her head, so you get a good view of her face, on which she wears an unmistakable snarl. She's got the bow, and she's got the makeup, but her facial expression is not particularly ladylike. She is angry, she is fierce, and she could definitely kick your ass. That bow on her head will not get in her way.
This is the entire M.O. of the show. On the surface, Cheer is about a team preparing for a big competition, but if you look closer, the series seems to be hitting audiences over the head with messages about gender. For people who didn't know that women are tough, Cheer proves it to them, and this message is even more powerful within the context of cheerleading. These women are first-rate athletes, and their sport happens to involve chanting, clapping, and wearing short skirts. Their preparation happens to involve a curling iron and a mascara wand.
And in terms of the audience's perceptions of masculinity, Cheer shows them that men can be strong and athletic while expressing their gender in a non-normative way. Most people have a path that they expect athletic men to go down, and it usually involves football, basketball, or other sportsball games that I am not going to list, but Cheer presents a different option. The series shows that cheerleading requires some of the same skills as football and requires as much if not more strength, skill, and stamina than many "real" sports.
Throughout my life, I have internalized a lot of shame about my femininity. For god's sake, I didn't embrace the color pink until about a year ago. So I hope that everyone who watches Cheer comes away with the knowledge that femininity is cool. It's ok to wear a giant bow on your head. It's ok if you have a high-pitched voice that jumps up several octaves when you shout. It's ok to smile and wave and clap with excitement. There is a hopefully ever-expanding world where it is safe to express yourself in these ways, and the popularity of Cheer will help it grow.
No comments:
Post a Comment