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.

[Because I'm linking this elsewhere, a refresher: you can comment here anonymously, with a Dreamwidth account, or using your OpenID identity from your home blogsite. Not all sites support OpenID but Livejournal, Wordpress, and Blogger all do, as well as a bunch of others.]

Comments

[caramarie]

Couldn't you say that knitting can be a reclamation of traditionally feminine arts? As opposed to the devaluing of them that has happened previously?

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?

[paxpinnae]

Knitting is a Eurocentric tool of American hegemony and is therefore at odds with the current third wave goal of intersectionality. Instead, we should practice batik cloth weaving and dying using natural compounds and sustainable sources.

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!

[callie]

Knitting's not a feminist act to me - feminism to me is about collective action rather than individual lifestyle choices. But I think knitting, and people's approach to it, can very much be informed by feminism and defining it as not in itself a feminist act (though some particular uses of knitting certainly are) doesn't mean that it can't sit very comfortably within an individual's feminist philosophy.

If that makes any sense at all.

[melannen]

I bopped over here from metaquotes, and couldn't resist:

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 like 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.