Children and Sexuality pp 299-315 | Cite as
At Once A-sexual and Anal: Baden-Powell and the Boy Scouts
Chapter
Abstract
This chapter explores aspects of Robert Baden-Powell’s loving invention in the years 1905 to 1907 of the Scout Movement and in particular of its definitive target audience and icon: the impossibly good and a-sexual Boy Scout. As Eric Hobsbawm noted some time back, Scouting constitutes an exemplary invented tradition, authored and authorized by a single initiator in response to political expediency, specifically, the widely shared perception of military and imperial crisis following the 1899-1902 Boer War.1 It was an invention that was brewed in the crucible of Robert Baden-Powell’s experiences during the Siege of Mafeking, South Africa, in that same war, and then manufactured virtually overnight, almost as an inadvertent function of his writing of the primer Scouting for Boys (1908). Yet Scouting characteristically claimed age-old provenance, in the form of the ‘scouts of the nation’ and the ‘scouts of history’, who included the pioneers of American colonization, Australian bushmen, Rhodesian frontiersmen, and Zulu warriors and Native American trackers, all of them clean-limbed, youthful and brave.2
Keywords
Political Expediency Bodily Waste Sexual Opportunity Army Medical Corps Sexual Energy
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Notes
- 1.Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar
- 2.Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, ed. Elleke Boehmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 13–14. Page references will henceforth be quoted in the text. As regards the references in this essay to the Native American influences on Scouting, Baden-Powell modelled many of his tracking and camping exercises on the work of the Canadian naturalist, writer and educa-tionalist Ernest Thompson Seton, whose knowledge of Native American culture profoundly informed his woodcraft training for young people.Google Scholar
- 3.Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Literature, rev. ed., first published 1984 (London: Macmillan, 1992).Google Scholar
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- Rod Edmond, Representing the South Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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- Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979);Google Scholar
- Don Randall, Kipling’s Imperial Boy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001).Google Scholar
- 6.See the definitive biography, Tim Jeal, Baden-Powell: Founder of the Boy Scouts, first published 1989 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
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- Lisa Chaney, Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J.M. Barrie (London: Hutchinson, 2005);Google Scholar
- Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); Rose, The Case of Peter Pan. Google Scholar
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- Greg Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
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- 10.On the significations of perversity, see Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 12.See Sigmund Freud, On Sexuality, trans. James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library 7 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); and also www.aven.com, the website of the A-sexuality Society, for whom a-sexuality is defined as sexuality turned down ‘almost to zero’, as in a radio.Google Scholar
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- 14.In public expressions of concern about hygiene and cleanliness in this period, broad reference was made both to the rectum and to bodily waste, already believed to be transmitters of cholera, typhoid and other diseases. For the links between these seemingly disparate areas, and their relation to empire, see George Rousseau, ‘Bums in the Time of Cholera: Sex, Sodomy, and Representations of the Fundament’, in C.E. Forth and Ivan Crozier (eds), Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality (New York: Lexington Books, 2005), pp. 44–64.Google Scholar
Notes
- 1.Allen Warren, ‘Citizens of the Empire: Baden-Powell, Scouts and Guides, and an Imperial Idea1’, in John M. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. 232–56.Google Scholar
- 2.Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
- 3.See, for example, Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).Google Scholar
- 4.For example, E.A. Parkes, Manual of Practical Hygiene: Prepared Especially for Use in the Medical Service of the British Army (London, 1864);Google Scholar
- C.A. Gordon, Army Hygiene (London, 1866).Google Scholar
- 5.Neil Cantlie, A History of the Army Medical Department, vol. ii (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone, 1974).Google Scholar
- 6.Alan R. Skelley, The Victorian Army at Home: The Recruitment and Terms and Conditions of the British Regular (London: Croom Helm, 1977).Google Scholar
- 7.Philip D. Curtin, Death By Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); idem, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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- 10.William Arbuthnot Lane, The Operative Treatment of Chronic Constipation (London, 1909); idem, Blazing the Health Trail (London: Nisbet 1929); Ann Dally, Fantasy Surgery, 1880–1930: With Special Reference to Sir William Arbuthnot Lane (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996).Google Scholar
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© Elleke Boehmer 2007