Boy Culture and Ireland 1916

This study offers an analysis of the significance of boyhood as a site of investment for masculinity in the context of Irish separatist nationalism from1900 to the Easter Rising of 1916. Both imperialism and anti-imperialism were linked by an ethos of militarism, as evidenced by commonalities in the apparently antithetical Fianna Eireann (the Irish nationalist boy scouts) and their equivalent the Baden-Powell Boy Scouts. What both organisations shared, it is argued, was a new emphasis on boy culture as the means to reformulate both masculinity and nationalism. Gender is itself a performative act that is articulated through bodily display. Boy culture afforded a space for these acts to be played out through performance in popular culture. The traces of these stylised displays are embedded in photographs of boys’ groups. Far from being unmediated records of historical fact, the evidential traces to be found in these images point to the fluidity of masculinity and its production through visible bodily displa...