Chilean Boy Scout Magazines as Literary Campfires: Masculinities and Nationality through Scoutista Short Stories

Abstract:This article illuminates the extent to which Chilean Boy Scouting has functioned not merely as a recreational program, but also as a literary project. I call this project scoutismo. Upon textual terrain, Chilean Boy Scout authors have constructed theories of gender and nationality, while Chilean boy scouts, as readers, have found themselves addressed as subjects whose masculinity and Chileanness appear to be in crisis. Through a close reading of short stories published in Chilean Boy Scout magazines from the 1910s to the early 1940s, I attend to the discursive complexity with which editors, authors, and readers have curated, produced, and consumed literature to train one another in the meanings of gender and nationality. Furthermore, I suggest that the Boy Scout magazine medium serves as the literary counterpart of a specific Scout practice: the campfire gathering, which a prominent scoutista author has described as a beautiful sharing of brief literary pieces. Not only around the flames, but also in the pages of magazines, boy scouts and their adult leaders use the short narrative genre to work out their masculinities and nationality.