A Discussion of the Representation of Masculinity and Femininity in ...

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‘Radical exclusion’ is the term van Leeuwen uses to delineate instances of social actors being totally excluded from the representation. It refers to the exclusion of the actors and any of their activities, and can be revealing in comparisons of the same social practice. The ‘Good Turn’ text (aimed at Brownies) and the ‘Chivalry’ text (aimed at Scouts) are recontextualizations of the same social practice but differ in respect of who is included and excluded. For example, the Knights dominate the Scouts’ text, but are radically excluded from that of the Brownies. They are portrayed heroically as the original purveyors of good turns in the Scouts’ text, and as a social group whose values should be reproduced by the Scouts, but are not mentioned in the Brownies’ text. The inclusion of heroes or representations of people to look up to will be further discussed in sections 6.4.5 and 7.1. In the Good Turn text, there is the suggestion that the Brownies can help their mother or a servant in accomplishing a good turn. However, there is no mention of mothers or servants in the Chivalry text, rendering them radically excluded. In a similar way, where there is another ‘home reference’ in the Brownies’ ‘Loyalty’ text (“You are taught to say grace before dinner...”), it is radically excluded from the Scouts’ text. It, therefore, seems that the Brownies are associated more with a home context than are the Scouts, which is perhaps not unexpected, given that the premise on which the Guides was founded was to prepare the girls for motherhood and marriage: “Its aim (the Girl Guides) is to get girls to learn how to be women – self-helpful, happy, prosperous, and capable of keeping good homes and of bringing up good children” (Baden-Powell and Baden-Powell, n.d.: 3). Page 33
6.4.2 Role Allocation In his discussion of role allocation, van Leeuwen makes the distinction between social actors who are activated or “represented as the active, dynamic forces in an activity” (1996: 43), and those who are passivated or “represented as undergoing the activity…as being at the receiving end of it” (p.44). In the texts I am analysing, both the Scouts and the Brownies are generally activated in activities and rarely passivated, but it becomes interesting to note in what type of activity they are represented as being active in. It is useful to draw on Halliday’s work on the transitivity system, which “construes the world of experience into a manageable set of process types” (Halliday, 1985: 106), and codifies the actors of those processes as Actor in material processes, for example, Behaver in behavioural processes or Senser in mental processes, to name a few. 6.4.2.1 Process Types – Gendered? In analysing the actors of the processes in the texts by Baden-Powell it is evident that the Scouts are generally represented as the Actors (or instructed to be the future Actors) in more material and abstract-material processes than are the Brownies. Material processes are “processes of doing” (Halliday, p.106), and express both concrete and abstract activity. They are further categorized into those that are transactive and those that are non-transactive, where the former involves two participants and the latter just the Actor and no other participant. Thus, by the very fact that more than one person is involved, an Actor in a transactive process is ‘doing’ something that will have an effect on the social world. Van Leeuwen argues that “the ability to ‘transact’ requires a certain power” (1995:90) and that “the actions of lower- status actors are more often represented as non-transactive” (ibid.). With this in mind, analysis of the ‘Smile’ texts reveals that the representation of action differs according to who the actors are. The Scouts are instructed to be Actors in the transactive material process of ‘making other people laugh’. This is an “interactive” Page 34
Page 1 and 2: A Discussion of the Representation
Page 3 and 4: “…scouting for girls is not the
Page 5 and 6: TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ..
Page 7 and 8: LIST OF TABLES Table 1: The 3rd per
Page 9 and 10: 1. INTRODUCTION The quotation that
Page 11 and 12: elieved that girls should be offere
Page 13 and 14: 2. LITERATURE REVIEW I will now des
Page 15 and 16: “ideologically loaded” (p.85) a
Page 17 and 18: 3. METHODOLOGY 3.1 Data Collection
Page 19 and 20: consider what is excluded as well a
Page 21 and 22: 4. SOCIETY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH C
Page 23 and 24: series of, at times, violent action
Page 25 and 26: 6. ANALYSIS As outlined in chapter
Page 27 and 28: use is not a feature of the Brownie
Page 29 and 30: 6.2 MODALITY This area of text anal
Page 31 and 32: not be able to resist crying, and a
Page 33: Brownies Scouts The purpose of ‘s
Page 37 and 38: The Brownies’ Loyalty text includ
Page 39 and 40: efer to a military identity that se
Page 41 and 42: of being non-military, it cannot be
Page 43 and 44: 7. CONCLUSIONS 7.1 Discussion of Fi
Page 45 and 46: 7.2 Weaknesses of the Study This st
Page 47 and 48: REFERENCES Baden-Powell, A. and Bad
Page 49 and 50: APPENDIX The ‘Smile’ Texts Page
Page 51: The ‘Loyalty’ Texts Page 50

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