Wearing leadership: Girl Scouts’ uniforms as symbolic signifiers

Abstract

ABSTRACT The present article distances itself from the scholarship’s tendency to describe youth leadership through the prism of the adult world. Leaning on ethnographic data, I explain how adolescent leadership is an outgrowth of social relations and cultural symbols that are perpetually negotiating the status quo. As part of an extensive study on female youth leaders, the paper focuses on the rich array of insignia that are made, worn, and exchanged by my research subjects: teenage female members of the Israeli Scouts (a co-ed Jewish youth movement). More specifically, I examine how the creation and display of material symbols on clothing mirror the leadership identity of Girl Scouts. In contrast to their uniforms and rank, which conform to restrictions and a formal hierarchy, the subjects engender a dynamic, non-formal, and open-ended set of symbols that visually represent power and status within their social group. Among the principal contributions of this study are insights on the nature of adolescent leadership and how it is wrought, maintained, and renewed within social networks.