December 2002/
January 2003

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Feminists in the Front: Protest Performance by Radical Cheerleaders

Valerie Bassett is a writer and former cheerleader living in Boston.

"Sanctions in Iraq? /WE AIN'T DOWN WITH THAT!/
deNYing MEDicine/PUNishing/
CHILDren!/STARVing a Nation!"

Radical cheerleaders ©Linda Haas

As I walked toward the subway on my way from the November 3 peace rally in Boston, I stopped to investigate loud, raucous, singsong chants that had drawn a crowd. At the center of the crowd were about twelve women of a range of body sizes, wearing red and black short pleated skirts and sweatshirts with anarchist skull and crossbone designs, thermal underwear, and combat boots, moving together in choreographed precision. They looked and sounded suspiciously like cheerleaders: air-slicing kicks, tight, percussive chants, and hip-grinding grooves. Yet these were not the cheers I remember from high school: no "Steven Smith/HE'S our man!/if HE can't do it/NO ONE CAN!" These cheers had hard-hitting political content:

"THIS conTAMination/IS a violation!/of UN LAW!/
they're AFTer our OIL/there's D.U.in the SOIL!/
it's KILLING/our CHILDdren!/our CHILDren!/OUR children!/
they SAY that they're after SadDAM/
but WHO gets the BRUNT of the bomb?/
they're KILLING!/
our CHILDren!/our CHILDREN!"

The effect was commanding: the women's presence more don't-mess-with-me than go-team-go. "Worcester Radical Cheerleaders," I read on a woman's jacket. My former high school cheerleading self high-fived my lesbian feminist pacifist self, and I had to find out more.

In 1996, returning home from a feminist anarchist convention, the Jennings sisters, Cara and Aimee, of Lake Worth, Florida, wanted a more creative and energizing way to participate in protest--a way that would engage people new to political demonstrations. Their idea was to borrow cheerleading to broadcast messages from the feminist left, and in so doing, they hit a cultural nerve. Now, from Gainesville, Florida to Burlington, Vermont, Austin, Texas to Amherst, Massachusetts, and Portland, Oregon to Warsaw, Poland, squads rehearse rigorously and perform at local, national, and international demonstrations. For these activists, radical cheerleading is more than campy fun. Non-hierarchical and consensus-driven, radical cheerleading brings women and some men together to sweat it out and take a stand, perhaps most subversive in its feminist insistence on the whole self: body and mind.

I spoke by telephone with Ciara, a Boston Radical Cheerleader, who joined a squad in Portland after witnessing their strength and power in leading the May Day 2000 parade. For Ciara and others, the leadership and visibility of the cheerleaders was especially significant because of the persistence of sexism in the left. As she put it, "I am not going to wait until we smash capitalism to talk about our bodies and reproductive issues, our realities as women." In the spirit of true gender revolutionaries, squads are inclusive of transgender men and women and open to biological men as well.

These days, the Radical Cheerleaders are focusing much of their energy on anti-war organizing, according to Tricky Martin, who maintains their website (http://radcheers.tripod.com/RC/). She shared this cheer from the Raging Grannies in Ontario, sung to the tune of "If you're happy and you know it."

"Even if we have no allies, bomb Iraq/ From the sand dunes to the valleys, bomb Iraq!/ So to hell with the inspections/ Let's look tough for the elections/ Close your mind and take directions/ Bomb Iraq!"

When your little girls and boys want to grow up to be cheerleaders, sign them up for radical cheerleading camp!

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