Institutionally appointed fan-athletes: The hegemonic performativity, commodification, and consumption of scholastic dance teams

Abstract

Dance team practices, often situated in sports settings, blur the boundaries between affirmational and transformational fandoms through their performative registers. In scholastic settings, dance teams cheer and perform at sports games, compete in athletic association and/or corporate dance competitions, and attend other events on behalf of their schools. Aiming to perform support for their schools authentically, dance team members act as institutionally appointed fan-athletes. In this role, they are often commodified by their institutions and consumed by its wider fan body while adhering to idealized aesthetic and interpersonal expectations. Choreographically, dance team routines tend to appropriate Black popular dances while warping them to fit aesthetic ideals that valorize whiteness. Studying dance teams through critical ethnographic and dance studies methodologies then highlights how normative modes of performative appropriation can be used primarily to reinforce White supremacist and cis heteropatriarchal social structures even through purported modes of female empowerment.