Radical Cheerleading Archives
In late 2000 I became involved in a radical cheerleading troupe then active in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario. We had a very solid group of about 12 people which performed at many local activist events. In March 2001, we attended a North American radical cheerleading conference hosted by the Womyn’s Centre at Carleton University in Ottawa, and in April 2001 we attended the Summit of the Americas protest in Quebec City. We met cheerleaders from all over, swapped cheers, and with them kicked some serious ass.
Through all this, I met Andrea Peneycad, then living in Victoria, B.C., who was running what was at the time Google’s top-ranked radical cheering related website, hosted by Geocities. I offered to help update it, and post recordings and photos collected from the Ottawa conference. The two of us continued to occasionally post updates, until sometime in 2003 some asshole guessed the password we’d been using and covered the site with adverts for stupid cheerleader fetish porn. We were pretty pissed, as you can guess, but they had changed the password and we couldn’t get in to change it back. Finally it occurred to someone on a cheering listserv that the porn was in contravention of the Geocities terms of service, and so they were able to get the account completely pulled.
By the time all this happened, Andrea and I had mostly moved on to other projects, and other websites had picked up where we left off, so the site stayed off-line. However, I still occasionally hear from people who are involved in radical cheerleading and want to see the cheers we had gathered back in the day. I’ve always meant to put this material up on-line again, and finally got around to it in late 2008. Everything’s there except some outdated stuff (contact information, links to dead websites). The old bulletin board, where most of the cheers actually came from, has long since disappeared, and with it any information we had about who wrote any of these cheers. (Sorry about that.) But despite all that, a lot of these cheers are still needed today, so I wanted to make them available. Help yourselves!
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