'A Malayan Girlhood on Parade': Colonial Femininities, Transnational Mobilities and the Girl Guide Movement in British Malaya

International audienceIndigenous girls often appear as silent bystanders in the narratives of imperial history in British Malaya. Yet their increasing importance and active roles in colonial society, in particular through the platforms of youth movements such as the Girl Guides at the turn of the twentieth century, demand greater attention from researchers. Guiding, essentially synonymous with British imperial identity to indigenous peoples, transformed local cultural norms and brought British ideals of girlhood and female virtues to native peoples in the colonial context. The idealised indigenous girlhood, now placed upon the pedestal of instructive enlightenment from Guiding, was to become “a brick in the wall of the Empire”. Newspapers in the colony boastedof the emancipatory possibilities of Guiding for local girls as Malayan girlhood were finally able to “come out of seclusion”. This paper examines indigenous girlhood and the changes that Guiding brought to them. It seeks to understand how the movement was appropriated for local and British girls alike. It answers the following questions: How did the image of colonial and indigenous girls change in colonial society as Guiding became more politically and socially visible? Furthermore, why did Guiding attract so many native girls in the colony despite it being labelled as “foreign” and imperialist? In addressing these concerns with concrete examples and case-studies, this paper aims to comprehend the transmission and the creation of values upon the key issues of gender and culture in the construction of both colonial and indigenous childhoods from metropole to colony