I'm gonna get in trouble, I wanna start a fight

[labellementeuse]

Unpopular feminist opinion: that some feminists enjoy knitting does not render knitting a feminist activity. Discuss.

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Comments

[melannen]

>>the situation wrt: affordable wool is very different here (in New Zealand we pay export prices for wool because, like dairy products, demand for New Zealand produce internationally is higher than supply locally).

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.

[kaberett]

Here from metaquotes - just a thank-you-for-a-fascinating-conversation comment.

[jackandahat]

"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."

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.

[melannen]

Yeah, that's something that seems to need to be said a lot (unfortunately).

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.)