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Scouting for girls? Gender and the Scout Movement in Britain

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journal contribution
posted on 2013-04-19, 08:58 authored by Sarah MillsSarah Mills
This article brings a feminist geopolitics to bear upon an analysis of the Boy Scout Movement in Britain in order to illustrate how an emphasis upon seemingly banal, embodied practices such as dressing, writing and crafting can provide a counter-view to prevailing notions of the elite, organisational `scripting' of individualised, geopolitical identities. Here, these practices undertaken by girls are understood not as subversive, or even transgressive, in the face of broader-scale constructions of the self and the collective body, but rather as related moments in the emergence of a complex, tension-ridden `movement' that exceed specific attempts at fixity along the lines of gender. Using archival data, this article examines various embodied practices by `girl scouts' that were made possible by such attempts at fixity but which also, in turn, opened up new spaces of engagement and negotiation. A cumulative shift from a determinedly masculine to a co-educational organisation over the course of the twentieth century thus reflects complex geographies of gender, national identity and citizenship and offers a historical contribution to the feminist geopolitics literature.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Citation

MILLS, S., 2011. Scouting for girls? Gender and the Scout Movement in Britain. Gender, Place and Culture: a journal of feminist geography, 18 (4), pp. 537 - 556.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publication date

2011

Notes

This article was published in the journal, Gender, Place and Culture [© Taylor & Francis (Routledge)] and the definitive version is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011.583342

ISSN

0966-369X

Language

  • en