711: Women and the Material Culture of Needlework

CCR 711: Rhetorics of CraftNov. 5, 2013

Wednesday, November 6, 13

Is this rhetorical?


Why is is this an ethical issue in the field?


material rhetorics


gendered crafts


The world of the needle... [has been] seen as trivial by some because it is ubiquitously and uncritically associated with women’s domestic work, ad demeaning and oppressive by many early feminist scholars who derided or shunned it, and as less than art and so less worthy of attention by still other scholars who avoided it. (1-2)


Outside the capitalist marketplace where the male weaver and male tailor became increasingly the norm, women have been both materially and ideologically associated with the making, repairing, and cleaning of clothes. In other words, within the world of the needle as elsewhere, men were understood to create, women to mend and tidy up” (Goggin 40-41).


Are worked cloth and thread a text?


“And yet, Parker herself begins her text in silken ink with the words “As I cannot write” (Goggin, 37).

Especially essential for their education was to learn how to sew, because “knowing how to sew for a woman is equivalent to knowing how to write for men.” (Campagnol, 169)


what claims are useful for bringing this within the purview of the field?


Craft and Bodily Knowledge (again)


“The power to perform magic with a needle comes through the embroiderer’s familiarity with stitches: with their structure, with hand movements required to make them and with their seemingly infinite variation” (Wearden, qtd on 4).


Thus, bodily knowledge is as important, if not more so, than vision and cognitive knowledge in embroidery -- the feel of the fabric, thread, and needle, as well as the movement of the hand, require a kinetic familiarity. ... A needleworker ... needs to know how to read and write the fabric via the mind and body. ... Hence, there are several kinds of epistemologies in the praxis of needlework and textiles: a bodily knowing, a cognitive know-how, and a resulting epistemology. (4-5)


Craft and Identification


consubstantialityexoticizing


Craft as Discipline


women’s dangerous idleness


crafting as social strategy


needlework as tripartite community

strategy


711: Women and the Material Culture of Needlework

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