Cheerleading culture and fandom: Gendered labor and practice in Taiwan's professional baseball fields

Abstract

This article analyzes how cheerleading has become central to the commercialization and gender representation of Taiwan's professional baseball. Drawing on scholarship on sport as spectacle and re-enchantment, as well as research on sexualization and emotional labor, the focus is on entertainment-oriented cheerleading in Taiwan's professional baseball. Since the Lamigo Monkeys introduced a Korean-style model in 2013, all CPBL teams have created female squads, whose prominence often rivals or eclipses that of the baseball players on the field. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews with fans, a staff member, and a former cheerleader, the study addresses three questions: how cheerleading culture reconfigures stadium space and culture; how cheerleaders perform gendered identities; and how fans’ practices reflect and reproduce these dynamics. Findings reveal that cheerleading shifts the stadium from a sport-centered to a performance-centered space, with hot zones established to maximize the visibility of cheerleaders’ sexualized bodies over the game itself. Cheerleaders’ professional survival is rooted in commodification and objectification, requiring the intense performance of a highly sexualized yet approachable girlfriend-like persona—a form of labor extended and amplified via live streaming and parasocial digital platforms. Furthermore, fan practices, including the creation of lucrative resale markets, actively reproduce and enforce hegemonic masculinity and the male gaze. While this culture successfully sustains spectacle and revenue for professional baseball in Taiwan, it fundamentally operates by reinforcing gender inequality and exploiting women's aesthetic labor, positioning the cheerleader's sexualized image as the symbolic core of the Taiwanese baseball experience.