According to Title IX, every female sports team should have equal access with boys sports teams to cheerleaders. As with so many things, this is not always put into practice (although it seems to be at the high school where The Squad takes place).
While cheerleaders certainly have an immense amount of cultural capital in the economy of high school, I don't think they're seen as "better athletes" than female track runners or lacross or basketball players. And there are plenty of school with excellent girls' teams in these sports, but I think it requires different skills; perhaps a gymnastics team or a dance team might be able to suck the talent out of cheerleading, but a) I'm not sure what effect having less talented cheerleaders would actually have on anything, and b) it would need to find a way to provide an alternative to the cheerleader's cultural capital.
Will there (be able to) be cheerleading in the feminist utopia? I don't know. Certainly there would have to be a greater influx of boys into the sport, like we see in college-level cheerleading. I am not, of course, an enemy of desiring gazes as such. Certainly there wouldn't be the devaluing of the traditionally-female virtue/value of encouraging school spirit which historically we see under patriarchy.
As for YA/children's lit, the person to ask would be Amy herself, since she's the one who studies it, but looking at my own reading and what was going on at the time, it seems to me it comes in a variety of categories. There's a canon of stuff we read in school which may be relatively recent (Madeleine L'Engle, Lois Lowry, Avi, any winner of the Newberry Award) but is approached with some reverence due to its imprimateur.
There's the "classics," those older (relatively speaking) works imported from the UK (Frances Hodgeson Burnett, Lewis Carrol, C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbit, maybe Rudyard Kipling) or elsewhere (Johanna Spyri), and older American texts which remain in the consciousness (Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Elizabeth Porter, Kate Douglas Wiggin). Since these texts are in the public domain, they can be reprinted and sold very cheaply, which helps to continue their visibility. While the way they speak to children may well be universal, they do speak to a particular set of material conditions which will be foreign to any American schoolkid.
Part I
While cheerleaders certainly have an immense amount of cultural capital in the economy of high school, I don't think they're seen as "better athletes" than female track runners or lacross or basketball players. And there are plenty of school with excellent girls' teams in these sports, but I think it requires different skills; perhaps a gymnastics team or a dance team might be able to suck the talent out of cheerleading, but a) I'm not sure what effect having less talented cheerleaders would actually have on anything, and b) it would need to find a way to provide an alternative to the cheerleader's cultural capital.
Will there (be able to) be cheerleading in the feminist utopia? I don't know. Certainly there would have to be a greater influx of boys into the sport, like we see in college-level cheerleading. I am not, of course, an enemy of desiring gazes as such. Certainly there wouldn't be the devaluing of the traditionally-female virtue/value of encouraging school spirit which historically we see under patriarchy.
As for YA/children's lit, the person to ask would be Amy herself, since she's the one who studies it, but looking at my own reading and what was going on at the time, it seems to me it comes in a variety of categories. There's a canon of stuff we read in school which may be relatively recent (Madeleine L'Engle, Lois Lowry, Avi, any winner of the Newberry Award) but is approached with some reverence due to its imprimateur.
There's the "classics," those older (relatively speaking) works imported from the UK (Frances Hodgeson Burnett, Lewis Carrol, C.S. Lewis, E. Nesbit, maybe Rudyard Kipling) or elsewhere (Johanna Spyri), and older American texts which remain in the consciousness (Louisa May Alcott, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Elizabeth Porter, Kate Douglas Wiggin). Since these texts are in the public domain, they can be reprinted and sold very cheaply, which helps to continue their visibility. While the way they speak to children may well be universal, they do speak to a particular set of material conditions which will be foreign to any American schoolkid.