"Cheerleading? That's Women's Work!"

Via Yahoo News:

A high school cheerleading squad from Michigan has been disqualified from competition because one of their members is a boy.

Before I go further, I should point out that, despite plenty of US media references that are ubiquitously available in the UK, the idea of cheerleading as a competitive sport seems a bit weird to me (I understand it more like Eliza Dushku's character in "Bring It On" does, who only joins the cheerleading squad at her new school because there's no gymnastics programme there). That said, taking the culture on its own terms, and accepting that it is a competitive sport - and going by those cultural references - I intend to comment.

The rule about school sports states that girls may compete on a boys' competitive athletic/sports team if there is no girls' option available, but boys may not compete on a girls' team if the opposite occurs. The reason for the rule, according to the governing body (MHSAA), is that, "Schools have adopted this position to preserve participation opportunities for the historically underrepresented gender."

Which is fine when you think about most sports and athletic activities played competitively. It is true that most sports have a heavy focus on the male forms of those games (to the extent that, this year, the BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist was ten names long, and consisted of ten men - see some commentry here).

That said, cheerleading appears to be an exception to that tendency. Any representation of cheerleading pretty much shows women or girls in the role (although there are male cheerleaders in Bring It On, the only explicit reference to them is derogatory, by a sleazy choreographer).

The boy at the centre of the current controversy had one sporting ambition: to be a cheerleader:

Brandon Urbas is like many other American teens: He spent much of his youth dreaming of being a high school varsity athlete. The only difference was the sport he hoped to compete in: Urbas wanted to be a cheerleader.

In 2011, Urbas achieved that dream, joining the St. Clair Shores (Mich.) Lakeview High varsity cheerleading team. Despite being the only male cheerleader on the squad, Urbas said everything was going swimmingly throughout the football season.

...

"I cried," Urbas told WXYZ. "I felt like they were taking away my dream of being able to do it in college and getting scholarships."

The consequence of enforcing the rule in the way that the governing body has done is to say that cheerleading is women's work, that women alone should do. The classic response would be to say that this constitutes sexism against men, but that would be mistaken. This reinforces traditional gender roles, and specifically it reinforces women as the object of male gaze while diminishing their agency. How so? Because cheerleading is a form of display sport (like ice dance, or gymnastics): it's something you look at, but there is no purpose beyond the performance. When a football player (whether that's NFL, Football Association, RFU or RFL, Aussie Rules or Gaelic) performs a great-looking move, he or she may perform that with a mind to the viewers and make it look good, but the ultimate purpose is to score for the team (or prevent the other team from scoring). There is an intended effect on the world (or at least, the game's microcosm of the world). In a display sport, the only intended effect is on the viewer, to attract them and excite them aesthetically, but not to change the nature of the game's world.

By creating a clear divide in the gendered nature of cheerleading (girls do it, boys don't), the MHSAA is reinforcing the traditional divide in gendered roles: "boys do stuff, girls get looked at". It does so in the negative way: "boys don't get looked at", which is one of the themes that lies behind male-on-male reinforcement of homophobia, and such a deeply ingrained trope in the patriarchal memetic biosphere (memeosphere?) that it underlies a lot of the attitudes about dating and gender relations in general.

While the spirit behind the rule involved here seems very laudable, the decision to stick to the letter rather than that spirit seems to be somewhat less so.

One thing that is interesting to me, though, is this little snippet:

Urbas fit in with the rest of the squad, and he even said that the Lakeview football team had stepped forward to support him, offering "to get his back" if anyone taunted him or gave him trouble.

I mentioned homophobia in the above passage, but it looks as though at Lakeview, there is not much of a problem with (explicit) homophobia or transphobia, or of stereotyping around these things. The report doesn't actually say anything about people not assuming that Mr Urbas is gay or transgendered, but when you write a "discrimination" story, you usually want to get in as many "-isms" as possible, right? So perhaps it is instructive and encouraging that it also doesn't once mention that anyone did make those assumptions. I am tired of, and obviously from the fact that I am making these comments I am used to, having to say "desire to do X doesn't make you gay, except where X is 'get hawt with people of the same sex'" Stepping outside of defined gender roles also does not make one trans*. This time, I didn't need to say that with direct reference to the article, and hopefully that will become the norm in future so I don't have to (and so that this kind of "thankfully I didn't have to..." message becomes redundant and doesn't have to appear).