[Commlist] CFP MAI: Feminism and visual culture - special issue dedicated to women's craft work.

Call for abstracts for a special issue of MAI: FEMINISM AND VISUAL 
CULTURE dedicated to the topic of women's craft work.

Please see below,

All best wishes,

Anna & (Isabelle)


Artistry of exquisite skill and creativity has often been belittled by 
the label of ‘craft’. In the West we have developed a distinction 
between art - the result of individual (male) genius - and craft, seen 
as a collective, anonymous and possibly even monotonous activity: 
women’s work. While there have been many revivals of interest in crafts, 
from the Arts and Crafts Movement in the late nineteenth-century to the 
Etsy-powered ‘mumpreneurs’ of our contemporary moment, craft has 
conserved associations with the domestic rather than with public space, 
consigned to the private, feminine realm and barred from the value and 
status of art.

*
*

In the 1970s, feminist artists turned to craft precisely in order to 
overturn this association, using women’s work in protest: ‘feminists in 
their embroidery showed that the personal was the political - that 
personal and domestic life is as much the product of the institutions 
and ideologies of our society as is public life’ (Parker 1984: 205). In 
so doing, artists such as Kate Walker and Judy Chicago drew upon a 
history of craft as protest that includes the banners stitched by 
suffragettes (Hunter 2019: 128-9). Surrealist artists, such as Dorothea 
Tanning and Louise Bourgeois had also incorporated textiles and sewing 
into unnerving, surrealist pieces that explored unconscious desire 
through the wry use of ‘women’s work’. Faith Ringgold’s narrative quilts 
used African American quilting techniques to give voice to stories of 
slavery and racial oppression.

*
*

More recently, feminist scholars (Cvetkovich, Berlant et al) have argued 
that many of the personal pathologies of our age should be understood 
political, a way of thinking the personal as political in a neoliberal 
age that undermines the binary between private and public: ‘what if 
depression could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, 
slavery, legal exclusion and everyday segregation?’ asks Ann Cvetkovich 
(2006: 115), arguing that, ‘the intimate rituals of daily life, where 
depression is embedded, need to be understood as a public arena … a 
location that doesn’t always get recognised as public but which 
nonetheless functions as such’ (156).

*
*

Cvetkovich further advocates for ‘crafting’s redefinition of what counts 
as politics to include sensory interactions with highly tactile spaces 
and with other people - or, in other words, feelings’ (177). Craft, with 
its repetitive gestures, inscribing itself always in a collective 
history and movement, could form the basis of a ‘utopia of everyday 
habit’, countering slow death, with slow living.

*
*

This resonates with the notion of ‘craftivism’, advocated by activists 
such as Betsy Greer and Sarah Corbett, who conceive of craft as a 
gentle, thoughtful mode of activism that replaces unthinking quick 
reactions with thoughtful, slow gestures, and helps to preserve the 
maker from the violence of activism fatigue.

*
*

Might we rethink our scholarly and critical approach to visual culture 
through such concepts of craft?

*
*

Essays and creative responses might address:

  *

    Critical approaches to visual culture made with traditional ‘craft’
    techniques such as sewing, quilting, knitting, crochet, etc.

  *

    Film as craft - montage, editing, animation (e.g. Lotte Reiniger),
    set design,

  *

    Craft as protest, collective crafting

  *

    Craft as healing, repair, mending

  *

    Women artists who work with crafting techniques such as Judy
    Chicago, Frida Hansen, Else-Marie Jakobsen, Eva Hesse, Tracey Emin -
    to name a few…

  *

    Feminist recuperations of traditional crafting techniques such as
    knitting, weaving and embroidery.

  *

    Interviews with practitioners

*
*

PLEASE SEND ABSTRACTS OF 300 WORDS FOR THE ATTENTION OF DR ISABELLE 
MCNEILL AND DR ANNA BACKMAN ROGERS TO CONTACT@MAIFEMINISM.COMBY NOVEMBER 
25TH.

*

*

Works cited:

*
*

Berlant, Lauren (2008), The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of 
Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Corbett, Sarah (2017), How to Be A Craftivist: The Art of Gentle 
Protest, London: Unbound.

Cvetkovich, Ann (2012), Political Depression: A Public Feeling, Durham & 
London: Duke University Press.

Greer, Betsy (2014), Craftivism, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press.

Hunter, Clare (2019), Threads of Life, London: Sceptre.

Parker, Roszika (1984), The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making 
of the Feminine, London: I. B. Tauris.



---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ vub.ac.be)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------