Be(ing) prepared : girl guides, colonial life, and national strength

This paper seeks to bridge a gap in feminist critique of gender and empire with regard to the founding of the Girl Guide movement in 1909. In contrast with previous studies of the Boy Scouts, which have briefly considered Guides as a mere derivative organisation, it suggests that the formation of the Guides, and printed material such as the first handbook How Girls Can Help Build Up the Empire (1912), were grounded in notions of the part which women, and girls specifically, could play in the imperial project. This paper proposes that, although tempered by an emphasis on raising children in order to prevent the “degeneration” of the British race, the Guide handbook permits increased non-domestic activity for Edwardian girls, which is justified by aims of preparing for home defence in case of foreign attack and for life in the colonies.

When being a boy is everything: understanding Re Alex

The decision of the Family Court of Australia in the matter of Re Alex¹demonstrated yet again that there's nothing .like a bit of under-age sex to raise the armchair experts from their usual near-supine positions. The  opinions of commentators like Bill Muehlenberg,² John Flemming³ and Babette Francis⁴ and even, unfortunately, the July 2004 "According to Merit" article⁵ have been unlikely to advance the profession's understanding of the complex issues faced by people experiencing transsexualism. The factors that should be considered in determining a person's sex for the purpose of the law in Australia are now well-settled, yet controversies over diagnoses, access to treatment and consequent legal status continue almost unabated as Alex's case has so aptly demonstrated.

Capitalism run wild: Zizou Corder`s lion boy and Victor Kelleher`s dog boy

While capitalism has long made highly efficient ideological use of Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' principle to justify ruthless business practices, this appropriation of animal metaphor has taken on new and considerably more problematic resonances in the wake of globalization. At a time when the negative consequences of corporate greed are becoming more apparent, as inequalities widen and power is shifted beyond governments and their borders, there is a spate of children's novels that explicitly challenges this new world order.

So what's a boy? : addressing issues of masculinity and schooling

This book focuses on the impact and effects of masculinities on the lives of boys at school. Through interviews with boys from diverse backgrounds, the authors explore the various ways in which boys define and negotiate their masculinities at school. Through looking at the problems and examining the question of what makes a boy a boy, this title offers recommendations and outlines directions for working with boys in schools in the future."

Is there any excuse for 'bad boy' behaviour in footy?

Discusses if there is any excuse for 'bad boy' behaviour in footy?

Gender and genre : a case study of a girl and a boy learning to write

This study addresses questions of gender and genre in early writing by drawing on systemic linguistic theory, It is a longitudinal case study that compares the writing development of two children, a boy and a girl/ who learned to write in classrooms that adopted an approach to writing known in Australia as 'process writing1, The children's written texts were analysed using the systemic functional grammar as developed by MAK, Hallidey and the models of genre and register as proposed by J,R, Martin. The children were followed for the first two and a half years of their schooling, from the first day of kindergarten to the middle of grade two. They were observed weekly during the daily ‘writing time’ and all texts were collected. Although the children were ostensibly 'free’ to determine both the writing topics and text types they produced, systemic analysis revealed that: 1) the majority of texts written were of one genre, the Observation genre, in which the children reconstructed their personal experience with family and friends and offered an evaluation of it. 2) a significant pattern of gender differences occurred within this genre, such that the boy reconstructed experience in terms of the male cultural stereotype of being an active participant in the world, while the girl reconstructed experience in terms of the female stereotype of being a more passive observer of experience. It is the strength of systemic linguistic analysis that it revealed how the choices the children made in language were constrained by a number of social and cultural contexts, including: a) the teacher's theoretical orientation to literacy; b) the models of spoken and written language available to the children; and c) the ideology of gender in the culture. In particular, the analysis made visible how children appropriate the meanings of their culture and socialise themselves into gender roles by constructing the ideology of gender in their writing. The study contributes to an understanding of genres by offering a revised description of the Observation genre, which derives from the Observation Comment genre originally identified by Martin and Rothery (1981). It also raises a number of implications for teacher training and classroom practice, including the need for: 1) increased teacher consciousness about gender and genre, especially an understanding that choices in language are socially constructed 2) a critical reassessment of the notion of 'free topic choice’ promoted by 'process writing' pedagogy, a practice which may limit choice and tacitly support the gender status quo.

There's a black boy dead and a migloo holding a gun : death, Aboriginality and history in Australian adolescent literature

This essay is concerned with the extent to which the attitudes and ideologies of colonial discourse continue to influence contemporary signifying practices in Australian adolescent historical fiction. Under scrutiny are three novels which take issue with the violent aspects of colonisation when so many members of the Indigenous population either died or were forcibly displaced: Melissa Lucashenko’s Killing Darcy, Gary Crew’s No Such Country and Mark Svendsen’s Poison Under Their Lips. Although these texts share a desire to interrogate monolithic versions of Australia’s history, it is argued that such motivations offer no guarantee that the implied audience is positioned to come to an understanding of perspectives belonging to ex-centric Others.

Negotiating masculinities : 'Yolngu Boy'

Concern with issues about masculinity has not only spread to many countries, but also into many fields.Health services re-noticing the relevance of men's gender to problems Educators are discussing programs for boys Criminologists have begun to explore why boys and men dominate the crime statistics, and violence prevention programs are taking increasing notice of gender issues. The intellectual debate about masculinity now has practical consequences. How we understand men and gender, what we believe about masculinity, what we know (or think we know) about the development of boys, may have large effects for good or ill in therapy, education, health services, violence prevention, policing and social services.

Body image development - boy children

This article examines body image development among preadolescent boys. In particular, it examines the nature of body image change, as well as the prevalence of these concerns in relation to weight, shape, and muscles. The ages at which these concerns happen are discussed within a developmental framework. Factors related to body image concerns among preadolescent boys are also evaluated. The roles of sociocultural influences (e.g., media, parents, and peers) and psychological factors (e.g., self-esteem and perfectionism) are discussed. The limited literature on cultural differences in body image concerns among preadolescent boys is also considered. Finally, the implications of body image concerns for prevention and intervention programs among boys are evaluated.

China in a book: Victorian representations of the 'celestial kingdom' in William Dalton’s 'The wolf boy of China'

Despite the wealth of material related to China in Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature, relatively few scholarly works have been published on the subject. Critics who have discussed the topic have tended to emphasize the negative discourse and stereotypical images of the Chinese in late nineteenth-century children’s literature. I use the case of William Dalton’s The Wolf Boy of China (1857), one of the earliest full-length Victorian children’s novels set in China, to complicate previous generalizations about negative representations of China and the Chinese and to highlight the unpredictable nature of child readers’ reactions to a text. First, in order to trace the complicated process of how information about the country was disseminated, edited, framed, and translated before reaching Victorian and Edwardian readers, I analyse how Dalton wove fragments from his reading of a large archive of texts on China into his novel.
Although Dalton may have preserved and transmitted some ‘factual’ information about China from his sources, he also transformed material that he read in innovative ways. These are reflected in the more subversive and radical parts of the novel, which are discussed in the second part of the essay. In the final section, I provide examples of historical readers of The Wolf Boy of China to challenge the notion that children passively accept the imperialist messages in books of empire.