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labellementeuseUnpopular feminist opinion: that some feminists enjoy knitting does not render knitting a feminist activity. Discuss.
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Date: 2011-02-20 03:21 am (UTC)I mean, it doesn't have to be a feminist activity, but it could be.
Or, if a male feminist knits, isn't that a feminist activity? Because he's transgressing gender roles?
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Date: 2011-02-20 03:44 am (UTC)Honestly the reclamation language just strikes me as a whole lot of feminist thinking "gosh, knitting's kind of a grandma/domestic stereotype! I hope I'm not being antifeminist! Knitting must be feminist somehow!" When actually, really, my feelings are that knitting is just a hobby. I believe strongly in leisure time and in women using their leisure time on things they enjoy, and I don't think knitting has to be defended past that since it's not harmful to others or to the self, as a rule. (RSI issues aside.)
I can see men knitting in public as a feminist activity though, for the reasons you lay out.
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Date: 2011-02-20 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 02:39 am (UTC)Interesting re: cooking. Of course the long observation is that women are cooks and men are chefs, but I have to say that I never feel this viscerally because my father cooks about twice as often as my mother does and always has done, and my siblings are all equally so-so at cooking. (Admittedly I'm doing a lot of the cooking right now, but that's because I *like* it.) My father just made and preserved a whole lot of spaghetti sauce to get rid of our tomato glut yesterday.
I need a food icon.
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Date: 2011-02-21 08:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 04:41 am (UTC)Here from metaquotes.
Date: 2011-02-21 10:51 am (UTC)But I don't knit *because* it transgresses gender roles. I knit because it's interesting. Me knitting in public isn't a statement of "Look at me, I'm being different." it's "I'm really bored and I need to do something with my hands" or "It's eight days to Christmas and I have two hats to finish".
My understanding (and I might well be wrong) is that for something to be a feminist act it had to be on purpose, there had to be feminist intent behind it. So I think *some* guys knitting might be a feminist thing, and some women might knitting might be a feminist thing, but just the act of sitting down and knitting isn't feminist in itself.
Re: Here from metaquotes.
Date: 2011-02-21 10:26 pm (UTC)Re: Here from metaquotes.
Date: 2011-02-21 10:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 03:38 am (UTC)Whoops, that's oppressive cultural appropriation. Hang on, one more scotch and I'll have this...
Wait! Scotch is a traditionally masculine drink! By choosing it preferentially over Cosmopolitans, am I boldly transgressing gender boundaries, or am I defining "masculine" as good and "feminine" as bad, playing into the patriarchal value system and becoming a self-loathing quisling?
Gender politics are confusing! Let's go shopping!
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Date: 2011-02-20 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 10:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-20 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-03-15 08:17 pm (UTC)Uh, yes, something like that. :)
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Date: 2011-02-20 04:02 am (UTC)If that makes any sense at all.
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Date: 2011-02-20 04:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 02:35 am (UTC)YES. I really loved Anjum's recent post on this.
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Date: 2011-02-21 01:04 am (UTC)Knitting is a feminist activity to me.
However, I often feel at odds with the current crop of hobby knitters - I learned before it was cool, from my grandmother and aunts and older women from the ladies' group at church (and a small cadre of rebellious female mathematicians at NSA summer camp, too) - and part of what knitting means to me is a connection back to that long line of women before me, it's carrying on and passing down female arts, it's saying that women's work was valuable even when it was working in the home, and that kind of work is still valuable, and I honor that. I wouldn't call it reclaiming, at least not in the usual sense, but I do think that honoring the lives, legacies, and coping mechanisms of women who didn't have all of my freedoms is an important part of feminism.
(Also, I think saying that "buying from the store is cheaper than buying yarn" is, frankly, fairly classist - yes, if you're buying hand-spun and all-wool and fancy dyed sock yarn, it is. If you're buying Caron by the pound and Lion Brand homespun and recycling old sweaters and working through those tubs of hand-me-down scrap worsted weight that everybody accumulated - then it's much closer to even. And that's only the kind of yarn that everybody I learned from ever used. Material + labor, the storebought is still cheaper, but part of the idea is rethinking the ways we attach value to labor.)
Also, I have taken part in a knitting and crochet based popular feminist uprising which is one of my greatest memories of small-scale social action, and don't tell me that wasn't feminist! (Summary: non-profit volunteer training week. Really annoying male instructor who consistently failed to listen to, or call on, any of the female students, but pulled a hissy fit whenever one of them wasn't staring at him starry-eyed with all her attention. He pulled it on someone who had her knitting out, she stood up and stared him down and told him that knitting is what women do when they get together, it's what women have always done, and if he has a problem with that maybe he needs to re-examine his own privilege, next class session we all brought knitting, he didn't start paying attention to us but he did stop expecting us to hang on his every word, good enough to declare victory.)
Because, yes: some of the ways knitting can be used (and one of them is as a way of subtly undermine men who expect to have your attention just because they're men - the more I use it for that purpose, and the more I think about how the older women of my acquaintance use it, the more I realize that getting out a handcraft is a subtle way of saying "Yes, dear, carry on talking, I'll just do some actual useful stuff while you're doing your man thing" without having to be confrontational. Some of them are just ways to survive as a person in a world that really doesn't want you to. The women I know forced to be stay-at-home moms because a woman in today's workplace can't make enough money to cover daycare, who even now knit endless polyester hats to keep themselves sane? Totally a feminist use of knitting.) Maybe none of the current crop of hobby knitters are ever in those situations - maybe they only ever knit in utopian lesbian communes
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synecdochic's stich'n'bitch group, or in the company of sensitive new-age men - but I think it's important. Also, if you've never gotten your knitting out and either had someone be surprised that "a girl like you" knits, or visibly reasses you and put you in a new category as a result, or had to defend the fact that you knit, and yes, all different kinds of people knit, why you even know some men who do --then you clearly haven't brought your knitting out around the same variety of people that I have!...I could go on about this. But anyway, tl;dr :
Some knitters being feminist does not mean their knitting is a feminist activity.
Some knitting being a feminist activity does not render all knitters feminists.
In fact, many of the women whose knitting is most subversive of the patriarchy are those least likely to openly identify with feminism, because those sorts of arts are inherently the subtle, low-grade, not openly political sort subversion. That does not mean their knitting isn't feminist.
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Date: 2011-02-21 01:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 02:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 03:00 am (UTC)Sorry if I was being offensively American-centric, and if this post is meant to be centered in a specific regional culture, there is probably a lot in my comment that is off-base! I did just now try to look at prices for the equivalent kinds of yarn in NZ and Aus, and at least in Australia, it looks like the very cheapest yarns are about the same price as in the US. I couldn't find any equivalent yarns on listed on any NZ stores that had websites, so I'd be willing to believe that it my sort of low-rent knitting isn't an option there. (Or my online NZ shopping skills are just poor.)
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Date: 2011-02-21 03:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 02:34 am (UTC)The women I know forced to be stay-at-home moms because a woman in today's workplace can't make enough money to cover daycare, who even now knit endless polyester hats to keep themselves sane? Totally a feminist use of knitting.
Whereas this, to me, is not feminist. (it's also not about knitting: knitting in this example could be replaced with "playing 10000000 games of Bejeweled Blitz", and if the women in your example *give away* the hats they make to their friends, I could mount an argument that it's another example of pressure on women to make sure that even their leisure time is about selfless giving. I don't necessarily agree with that position but, you know, it's there.) I respect the value of leisure time, as I said above, and I think it *is* part of feminism for women to look after themselves: but I don't think that has anything to do with knitting.
The reason I'm trying to distinguish between "hobbies" and "knitting" is (related to a small drama on local feminist blogs, which you won't be familiar with) due to questions I have about what someone described as "the construction of the ideal modern Wellingtonian* feminist", you know, the vegetarian cupcake-baking knitter who likes vintage dresses and cheap, legal, and equitable access to abortion. I love to knit and I like cupcakes (but I eat meat and I can't fit into vintage sizing), so I'm not criticising those activities, but I don't think it's totally unreasonable to ask questions about whether *photos of your knitting* belong on feminist blogs. (this kind of post undoubtedly does: but my concern is in the example in this post of going to an A&P show and being surprised at baking competitions, and then deciding they could be read as feminist because they value traditional women's work. Well, yes they do: but I'm not going to call an A&P show feminist even so, because of the way it requires buy-in to women's roles and men's roles.)
And for the record, this attitude: "the more I realize that getting out a handcraft is a subtle way of saying "Yes, dear, carry on talking, I'll just do some actual useful stuff while you're doing your man thing" without having to be confrontational." is exactly the reason I start wondering about these things, because I don't know that a tool to help us preserve a kind of Robert Jordanian view of relationships between men and women is something that I can really celebrate.
*the city I live in; it was an *extremely* localised drama.
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Date: 2011-02-21 04:14 am (UTC)Okay, sorry if you get this sort of thing a lot, but I must ask: is this a dialect thing where "wool" is used for all yarns, or are you meaning specifically yarn made out of spun animal hair? Because any yarn that has ever been part of a living creature is actually fairly expensive yarn on my scales. (On the other hand, see my comment to Callie: I couldn't find any nasty cheap polyester yarn for sale in online NZ stores, so maybe you do have the choice of good woollen or nothing? Or possibly imported synthetics would be just as expensive as animal fibers?)
The intersection between free time and income is ... complicated, but I will just point out that (again, at least where I come from), lower class/poor includes a large portion of people who are underemployed/unemployed, disabled, retired, and, yes, stay-at-home parents. The best spontaneous stitch'n'bitch I ever took part in was when I was working a volunteer shift at a women's homeless shelter. (This category also includes people who do shift and seasonal work and minimum-wage service industry work that involves a lot of time sitting with idle hands waiting for something to happen.) But... yeah, the leisure/labor/class/value/privilege/ideology axis is way more complicated than I probably should have tried to tackle at this time of day (US).
And, yes, there's a reason I've done hats, gloves, scarves, afghans, socks, bags, armwarmers, jewelry, lap robes, bikinis, doilies, Christmas ornaments, lace, doll clothes, plush toys, mathematical and scientific demonstration pieces, protective cases for electronics, kitchen linens, pillow covers and ponchos, but have never made a sweater. :D (And it's not just that I'm scared of sizing.) Various ways modern hobby knitters have sometimes defined "real knitting" to exclude all or some of those things is another reason I occasionally give in and rant about it to random people...
Also note: the reason other than price that none of the women in my family work with anything other than synthetics, and on special occasions cotton, is that of course you can just throw it in the wash! We do not allow any garments in this house that require special laundry treatments, are you kidding? Hand-knit stuff in polyester and polycotton is just as washable as store-bought stuff in those fibers.
>>knitting in this example could be replaced with "playing 10000000 games of Bejeweled Blitz"
Hmm, see, I would say that isn't so. Because some of the women my age who've had this experience are gamers, and the reason they've picked up knitting instead is that they've discovered that there's a reason their mother and grandmother did it too, because they tried other things to keep them sane and nothing worked: because, unlike many other hobbies (and, maybe most crucially, unlike almost all hobbies that aren't culturally coded female) it's something that actually works do to while child-minding. With a pattern close enough to your skill level that you're comfortable with it, it takes up just enough of your attention to keep you sane while leaving the majority of your attention (and your vision!) on your kids; you can carry it with you easily, both around the house and out places; you can pick it up and put it down (repeatedly, if necessary, at short intervals) without having to go through a lot of set-up and clean-up, and while still making progress you can be proud of; there are no small or breakable pieces that children can lose/eat/destroy/injure themselves on/put out of order if you have to step away from it for a minute (at least, not without trying very, very hard;) etc.
In other words, it's basically the childproof hobby. (And I'm not saying that knitting is the only hobby that works like that, though I suspect any list of hobbies you came up with to fit those criteria would be heavily coded female. And I'm not trying to put a value judgement on women who can child-mind while doing nothing else, or who can manage to game or read or tie fishing flies while tending to toddlers, because some people can, and more joy to them.)
But that kind of knitting is not about having leisure time: it's about having time that isn't actually leisure time, because you are doing work, intensive enough work that you can't actually do most other leisure time activities. And yet it is the sort of work that drives some people dotty if that is all they have. So, yeah, I think it's possible to mount an argument that knitting (and certain other female-coded hobbies) can be, in some ways, more interconnected with gender politics than most other hobbies, because they fit differently into the pattern of home-making, child-minding, cooking, 'women's work'. That doesn't mean it's automatically feminist, but I think it does have resonances that a thousand games of computer solitaire doesn't. (Because I can't play computer games, even mindless ones, while minding toddlers. I've tried.)
I am going to bow out on the discussion of giving/leisure/value again, but yes, there are arguments to be made about it (SO MANY ARGUMENTS). I will take this space to note, however, that at least one of the lower-middle-class stay-at-home moms I'm using as an example currently has pieces on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. :)
And I think the sort of subtly subversive relationship I was describing there is certainly not healthy, no, and not an ideal to strive for. But I think that sort of thing was, and still is, for many women, an important coping mechanism, a way to create some sort of power space in a structure that doesn't offer them any space, or any path out of the structure. And I think that a feminism that tries to brush away all those generations of women who made what spaces they could for themselves and their daughters, even if in less-than-ideal ways, or tries to paint them as simply brainwashed, oppressed victims or part of the problem, is a feminism I don't want to be a part of. (I will grant you that this is a minority opinion, but I feel it very strongly, which is part of the reason I get so passionate about things like knitting. ;)
And all of that said! I think fundamentally we agree with each other. I would certainly agree that "a photograph of my knitting project" or "this is how much fun I had at my stitch'n'bitch" does not belong on a feminist blog unless it's got some kind of extended context or analysis with it. Because... yes. Just because you knit and are a feminist doesn't mean your knitting is feminist. And saying "Look, women do the things that women do!" is not necessarily feminist either, especially if it's through a context filter that uncritically glorifies hetornormativity.
(I have to admit my reaction to the bit about the A&P show in that post you linked was not so much to her discussion of recognizing women's work, as to her surprise that such recognition existed. Which I suspect is another class thing. Because New Zealand does have lots of country fairs with canning and baking displays, I checked this time! And maybe her shock that such a thing existed is evidence that feminism really does still have a place for that kind of basic acknowledgment? Because yes, at least in the Anglo societies whose history I'm most familiar with, women have been gaining status and cultural capital through contests like that! For a very long time! And yes, there are still many women who live submerged in those kinds of cultures, and still value that kind of cultural capital! And if there are grown-up modern urban women who want to speak for feminism who didn't know that-- *throws hands in the air*)
Also, thank you for acknowledging that you enjoyed my comment. I hope it comes through that I am enjoying everyone in this discussion too, even if I am arguing with it a lot.
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Date: 2011-02-21 09:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-21 11:01 am (UTC)So much this. I'm currently unemployed and have multiple disabilities, and it wouldn't be much of a stretch to say knitting has saved my sanity (and my extension, given I have depression, my life).
When you're unemployed you're bombarded with messages telling you that you're useless, stupid, lazy, and wasting your life. And those are crushing, they destroy how you see yourself and they can destroy you.
So last couple of winters me and some mates had a thing where we filled bags with stuff for homeless people - energy bars, first aid kits, handy little stuff we could buy in bulk. And I knit hats and scarves to put in. And it made a real difference - when every day I was checking my E-Mail to either rejection letters, or just nothing, I could pick up my needles and I could make something, and in a few hours later I'd have a physical object, something I could look at and say "See? I was doing something", and something that would help someone.
Or I can learn new skills - again, intersections of being stone broke and the disabilities, taking classes in something is currently out of my reach. But I can sit down with google and I can teach myself something new - yes, it's knitting specific, but it's A New Skill, it's being able to step away from the computer and go "I can do something I couldn't three hours ago". Big help when you're constantly being told you're stupid.
So yeah - am glad you commented with that, because it's nice to see it said other places.
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Date: 2011-02-21 07:31 pm (UTC)There seems to be this idea that either a) poor people are just lazy slobs who should be ashamed of themselves, or b) poor people work long hours for no money and should be admired for that, and you have to buy into either one or the other, and that is such a false dichotomy.
(I am way, way off feminist and knitting at this point, but there's actually some really interesting historical/economic work I've read lately that's talking about intersections of class and labor and leisure, resistance and exploitation and ideology, and it's possible to look at the history of Western industrialization [back to the very earliest mass-production shops in the 14th and 15th centuries in Europe], where consistently one of the main points of class conflict is that capitalism requires people to value money over free time, and over most of Western history, most people, once their basic comforts are covered, would rather have the time. So a lot of effort has to be put in by the folks who control the markets to force people to take money instead of time. Mostly by taking those necessities away unless they work fifty or sixty or more hours per week, or by false promises of leisure later if you labor now. This does not mean poor people are lazy, this means capitalism is screwed up as a system.)
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Date: 2011-02-21 10:55 am (UTC)I can buy a jumper in Primark for a fiver. Now granted - it's not high quality, and Primark has their issues, but it is a jumper, it will keep me warm in winter, etc etc. And I can't afford to buy a "high quality" one, so the fact they exist doesn't factor into my decision.
So really, you could argue that it's classist to say yarn + labour is cheaper - not only does it put a tag of zero on my labour, but it also assumes the cost of what I would be buying in store is much higher. (I'm not calling you classist, but I'm saying if the argument could be made, it could easily go in that direction.)
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Date: 2011-02-21 07:14 pm (UTC)I was basing this on: I can walk into the average "discount" store in my area (which would be Wal-mart/K-mart here - that is, a large chain store that sells mostly cheaply made imports at low prices) and buy a pound of worsted weight polyester for ~$10 (US), which is enough to make a basic sweater (to exactly the sizing and styling I want.) I can walk into the same store and buy a ready-made sweater for ~$10, although generally I'd be looking more like ~$15-20 at the low end if I'm paying the discount store's full retail and want any selection at all (though it will still be a fairly low selection at that price, and for women's clothes, not much range of sizing, either.)
If I intensively bargain-shop (sticking to major sales and clearance racks, keeping an eye on the even lover-end shops like closeout discounters and thrift shops) I could probably get a sweater for half that, but I could also probably get the yarn for half that, and having the ability for intensive bargain-shopping is another complicated thing!
So, yeah, for me, it comes out very close to even, except that I will probably like the $10-for-yarn sweater much more than the $10-store-bought one, and a little bit of online international/interregional comparison looks about the same, at least in places that have stores with full websites. And no, that doesn't include labor, but the issue of pricing labor for craft goods is so complicated. One way to look at it is: if I had money I could probably buy a brand-new hand-knit sweater of the same quality I could make with the $10 yarn for $100-$200. So I prefer to say it's not putting a price of zero on the labor, it's putting a price of $90 for the labor, which is more than the kyriarchy is willing to pay me for the same work, and under better working conditions.
And I know a lot of people who craft and refuse to sell their work because they couldn't sell it on the market for what the labor's worth, and refuse to undervalue their labor. But they are more than willing to put it into a gift economy which does not undervalue their labor even if it values it differently than a capitalist economy would. This is not the same as refusing to value the labor. Insisting that monetary exchange is the only possible way to mark value is also classist. ;p
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Date: 2011-02-21 07:19 pm (UTC)