riot grrrl

Craft and Privilege, Part 3: Looking at our Legacy.

| Betsy

If you haven’t already read them, I suggest reading Craft and Privilege Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this post.

Funnily enough, I didn’t intend on making this a 3-part blog post when I first wrote about Craft and Privilege last week. However, it opened so many cans of worms, that I felt like there was more to add.

First off, as asked in a comment to the first post, I want to talk a little bit about class privilege. The type of privilege I am addressing here. Of course, not every crafter in the whole world is privileged; however, those most represented and known on the crafternet are. We’re the type of crafter that can afford to buy $80 a sweater for yarn and not have to worry about how we’re going to eat and/or pay the electricity bill that month. And because of that reality, we have a privilege that a lot of people don’t have. And since people tend to have friends that are similar to themselves, it’s entirely possible you don’t even think you’re privileged because everyone in your world is just like you. Does that mean that this is applicable to everyone? Heck no. But it’s applicable to many people.

If you’ve ever heard me speak or read any of my essays, it won’t come as a surprise that I think that Riot Grrrl had a lot to do with setting the stage for the craft resurgence to happen. It allowed many of us to realize that we could do anything we wanted, and was incredibly important for many women, as it allowed us to hear, see, and understand, some of us for the first time, the power of our own voices. (For more about my position on Riot Grrrl, go look over here (2005) and here (2015), two posts about RG written a decade apart.

However, Riot Grrrl’s importance and legacy was tainted by the fact that people viewed it as something only applicable to privileged white girls. I mean, it’s such a negative part of it that people have written papers on it. According to that last link, even Corin Tucker criticized Riot Grrrl, a movement that she was earlier involved with:

Corin Tucker’s song “White Girl” addresses her own privilege and disgust with the Riot Grrrl movement but envisions a solution: one that suggests change will only occur once criticism could be directed inward at the movement’s inherent lack of inclusion.

And with all the blog posts about making all the pretty things and $80-yarn sweaters and items that in 2001 would have been DIYed and been imperfectly perfect are done professionally by teams hired to churn out blog content, we are heading down that road. Meaning that the craft movement will not be seen as helpful and exciting and freeing and post-third wave (feminism), it will be seen as privileged and boring and perfectly milquetoast.

By buying into the idea that we have to be perfect, we are becoming a microcosm of what the Industrial Revolution brought us. We are becoming enemies of our imperfections in order to get more likes and shares and blog hits. And yes, some of our handcrafted goods have had all the “good” sucked out of them because we’re reaching for a perfected conflation of our very selves.

And that the craft resurgence could be seen as anything less amazing and powerful and strong breaks my fucking heart. In two. Because in the beginning (2000-2002), it was about curiosity and being proud of yourself because you could make things and about reclaiming something that a lot of us were taught to avoid given what the second wave taught us. It was about reclaiming our power, not about privilege. The more we go astray from that sense of power and wonder that the craft resurgence was fucking founded on, the more we teeter on the edge of possible whitewashing the whole thing.

Because craft, true honest craft, was about utilitarianism and learning new things and providing yourself (and loved ones) with things that were made just how you wanted. It was not about money or competition or likes. It wasn’t about stress or working yourself into the ground. It was about everyone (every color, gender, age, income) making things.

And around the beginning of this century, craft was fun. And reclaiming it meant we were at a point where we could make things and pay our own bills. But now, everyone has professionalized things to a point where there is no room for play. Or making a mistake. Or deep, honest, fucking visceral authenticity. And I’m beginning to feel like Corin Tucker, you guys. And my heart is in pieces. So here, to the handful of you that read this on my newly-resurrected blog, I ask you, to making craft fun again for you. For us. For our legacy.

The Riot Grrrl Manifesto, Craft, and Community

| Betsy

The amazing Alien She show that has been traveling* around the United States just opened at the Orange County Museum of Art. In reading an article about the show, which is stupendous and I highly recommend seeing, over at Fast Company (this article), I clicked over to the link for the Riot Grrrl Manifesto, which is here.

Then I wrote this over on Facebook, which also belongs here, too.

riot_girl_manifest_Kopie

The original Riot Grrrl manifesto by Kathleen Hanna from BIKINI KILL ZINE 2, 1991 [is] good reading and mega inspiring. Although I saw (and had some) a lot of early RG stuff, I hadn’t read this until today.

While some of it is on the angsty-side, there’s a lot of good points, which were much more needed 20 years ago. This is my favorite:

“BECAUSE we are interested in creating non-heirarchical ways of being AND making music, friends, and scenes based on communication + understanding, instead of competition + good/bad categorizations.”

I kind of feel like we did that with craft, y’all. I know we differ on whether the craft resurgence came from RG origins, but we created a very inviting scene once upon a time, one that still exists. We showed up for each other and collaborated and owe a lot to what RG fought for and sweated over. (Well, them, and thousands of other feminists prior!)

I am proud to be in a community that helps others grow and succeed, one that celebrates the good fortunes of others, instead of taking them down. I feel lucky to have found craft when I did and know I owe a lot of what I have due to timing and little else. I am grateful to have met some incredibly awesome people down this road, people whose work I greatly admire and am lucky enough to call friends and peers.

So, I guess my next question is, what are we going to do next? xx

*You can see me in the show if you go! I was one of the people the incredible Faythe Levine interviewed for Handmade Nation. While my interview didn’t make it to the film, I was well chuffed to see that my photo pops up in the related photostream, yeah!

FEMEN & Bikini Kill (Craftivism Hits the Ukraine!)

| Betsy

The photo above changed my life. No, really. It was the beginning of my discovery of Riot Grrrl and DIY ethics. This picture made me realize that it was okay to be angry and confused and frustrated and loud as a teenage girl. It made me not feel so alone at 16 when I was angry at all the world’s problems and violence to women. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna (the women in the photo above) had a scream that enveloped many of us in the early 90s.

Seeing these photos below made that 16 year old in me smile and wish nothing but happiness and strength to these women. I may not be wearing the same stomping shit-kicking boots and holding the same angst, but the part of me that knows what it’s like to be set free and not be scared to speak out feels like it’s just like 1991.

Ok, so technically it’s craftivism. FEMEN’s fighting back against the sex-trade industry. The sign above says “Ukraine is not a Brothel” and the bikinis below are not bikinis, they’re H1N1 masks sewn into bikinis as a statement against the H1N1 hysteria in their country. From their website:

WE ARE THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT:
*We unite young women basing on the principles of social awareness and activism, intellectual and cultural development.
*We recognise the European values of freedom, equality and comprehensive development of a person irrespective of the gender.
*We build up a national image of feminity, maternity and beauty based on the Euro-Atlantic Women’s Movements experience.
*We set up brand new standards of the civil movement in Ukraine.
*We have worked out our own unique form of a civil self-expression based on courage, creativity, efficiency and shock.
*We demonstrate that the civil movements can influence the public opinion and lobby the interests of a target group.
*We plan to become the biggest and the most influential feminist movement in Europe.

Want more? Go check out this interview with FEMEN’s leader, Anna Gutsol. And read more about FEMEN here.

curiosity may have killed the cat, but not craft.

| Betsy

I was drawn to a recent craft research post that covered several different issues I’ve been thinking about lately.

I think that there is a barrier in thought between the US and the UK regarding craft. My post from yesterday regarding hierarchy was written without knowing there had been a discussion on the very same issue on both craft research and museum blogging. And I believe we are speaking about different hierarchies: one between art and craft and one from within the craft community itself.

In having the opportunity to work both in the US and UK, I can attest to the two extremely different modes of thought between the two. But that’s hardly surprising given the way that history allows for divergent paths (and one notably longer than the other)- it is only now that there is a craft revival on both shores that we are clearly able to view the gaps.

On craft research, Mike Press notes that “Its not so much that our concerns (this side of the pond) are hugely different- it’s just that we are driven by a different set of issues which arise from the politics of academic inquiry in the UK.” Out of curiosity, what politics exactly? My biggest concern lies in the fact that I have been told that as someone who wanted to research crafts in the UK, it “wasn’t important that I learned how to knit” by someone whose opinion I hold in high esteem. My reaction was nothing but shock as, from my perspective, in order to better understand what I’m looking into (in my case, largely textiles), my research is only richened by being familiar with the very craft I am studying.

I think the main problem I have with craft at the moment is based on audience. It is my goal to write somewhere between the academy and the “hobbyist,” because if I just focus on one or the other, I’m missing out on a key piece of this cultural inquiry. Going straight from an academic perspective, I run the risk of not only alienating those that I create with but also rich ethnographic insights which I might not be able to garner elsewhere. Going straight from a craft perspective, I run the risk of sounding “happy clappy” (to quote a futher craft research post by Georgina and not taken in any way seriously by anyone from inside the academy.

This is in no way an attack on craft research, a blog which I am very excited about. I just have some questions. When Mike says that craft is usually considered “domestic, working class or just plain thick”, I wonder about the definition, because ‘thick’ can either mean stupid or as it is sometimes used in narratives “a rich description.” Because to me, craft is what it is because it is ‘of the people’ instead of being born from the academy. It has found its way into the cultural conscience not only because its creations historically tend to be utile, but because before the Industrial Revolution it was a common way of life. Modernity has turned craft on its head.

The current craft resurgence in the US owes a lot to stateside modes of feminism, and in my view, predominantly Riot Grrrl. Echoes of this can be seen in the UK, especially in some of the larger cities where Riot Grrrl had some sort of presence in the 90s. The fact that the author of this week’s earlier Guardian article regarding the subversive state of craft, Eithne Farry, used to be in the band Tallulah Gosh, is further proof of a possible connection.

The struggle we are all now having and hashing through is in regard to the definition of craft. While, I, too, struggle with this issue, one of the most important things to remember is that at its root, craft is not a “system of thought.” Craft was born out of a need for things, which separates itself from art. Now that we now longer have that need and can buy products formally made at home at the corner shop, the revolution really begins.

ethnography is kooky

| Betsy

i’ve been making lots of notes lately.

here’s one of them:

i knit, therefore i am?

part of me thinks that my involvement in craft is partly due to a full-on embracement of the domestic. the only time i did crafty things was in Girl Scouts. i played a lot of sports growing up, even though i wasn’t very good. in fact, i pretty much SUCKED. i was a tomboy. for the next 15 years.

i got involved in punk rock and Riot Grrrl, but anger was never my strongpoint. i listened to a lot of records and drank a lot a beer and cried a lot til i was about 26.

then i started crafting. my hands started makingmakingmaking and my brain started processing all the pain it had been trying to ignore.

embracing the domestic while still being strong and outspoken makes me feel whole, in a way that sports or beer or tears never did. i’ve become a Girl Scout once again, by accident, only this time it’s my choice and i don’t have to wear a sash.

t-minus 7 days and counting until we’re back to our normally scheduled programme.