Tag: lgbt

Craft, Trade, and Labor

Luddites, labor organization, and why you should be able to get yarn and plumbing supplies in the same place.

With the total closing of Joann stores around the US, there’s been much discussion about where sewists can go to get fabric. Sure, Michaels has just announced that they’ve bought Joann’s brand IPs and are beginning to carry more fabric in stores, and I hope that will help crafters, especially those who don’t live near independent fabric businesses or dislike shopping online for materials. In the big box craft store war, I’m team Michaels, and I believe the only reason to step foot in a Hobby Lobby is if you’re planning to steal.

RIP girl we’ll miss you

I have another suggestion: hardware stores should start carrying craft supplies.

I think it’s a natural progression. I should be able to get every kind of tool for a DIY project at a Lowes. If you’re building furniture, shouldn’t you be able to buy upholstery fabric in one stop? If you’re painting your living room, why not get materials to make your own decorations as well? There’s nothing less cosmetic about picking a lighting fixture as there is in picking hardware for a hand-sewn dress.

And don’t get me started on the cosplayers. Sewing, hammering armor, shaping foam, 3D-printing, engineering electronics into a mech suit – they would eat this shit up.

But most importantly, I’m invested in the idea of dissolving the borders between “trades” and “crafts”. I follow the delightful Brian Kochan, a fiber artist and content creator, and he posted a video recently that really struck me.

A screenshot of Brian’s video. He holds up an unspun batt of royal blue fiber. He looks directly in the camera, and over the image is text that reads “This and mending the divide between craftsmen & tradesmen cultivated by the elite to make it harder for us to organize in Unions & Guilds”

In this screenshot, Brian is spinning the fiber. He looks directly in the camera, and over the image is text that reads “This and mending the divide between craftsmen & tradesmen cultivated by the elite to make it harder for us to organize in Unions & Guilds”

The caption of the video reads “A propaganda campaign the wealthy have been running since the Industrial Revolution…Divides among the working class are not accidental and do not benefit us.”

The Industrial Revolution-era brought machine-made textiles and with it, a class of working people who were losing their livelihoods. This created the Luddite movement, made of anti-mechanization textile workers who would protest their disenfranchisement by destroying textile machinery. The Luddites were named for Ned Ludd, who is mythologized as having lost his job as a textile apprentice, was whipped for being a “vagrant”, and then took a hammer to a mechanized loom (McGaughey, 2018). Even if it is a myth, a man who was replaced by machines and then punished for having been replaced by machines is a powerful symbol of the movement, and still feels relevant 250 years later as corporations promise that generative AI is the answer to everything.

Get fucked, Clegg

In school, I was usually taught that the Industrial Revolution was a universally good thing. It did have benefits, namely, fomenting a working class consciousness that give us many rights that we enjoy today like weekends, work breaks, 8-hour shifts, overtime pay, labor unions, OSHA, and child labor laws. Of course, these things only came after incredible tragedy and deadly working class struggle (The Battle of Blair Mountain, The Haymarket Riot and ensuing unjust executions, and many other protests that drew brutal policing and state military interventions). The rights most Americans enjoy now are the work of the people in labor unions, Marxists, anarchists, and undercover muck-raking journalists – not a direct result of the Industrial Revolution itself.

Another promise of the Industrial Revolution was cheap goods. Items previously only accessible by the wealthy could now be mass-produced and sold at lower prices. Isn’t that nice? The poors can have things too. But as the Luddites had the skills to make the same things at home (and at better quality) that steam-powered machines were now being used to fabricate, had they really gained anything?

This is the trick: We have to recognize when new technologies are being used to disenfranchise us and then sell us worse versions of our own productivity. And we have to consider what share of resources these new technologies require. If the machinery demands more raw material – let’s say, thread and yarn – because it can create products faster and those products break down faster because they’re worse quality, it becomes more difficult and more expensive for a craftsperson to obtain those same materials. It becomes more difficult and expensive for that craftsperson to even maintain their craft.

The most obvious contemporary example is fast-fashion grindmills like Shein. The promise of looking cool for cheap, constantly being on trend without breaking the bank, has been advertised as a solution for those who can’t afford quality or designer names. But these clothing items are still handmade by craftspeople. If you have one person sitting at a sewing machine in their craft room or at their dining room table, who has bought fabric and a pattern from a boutique shop, making clothes for themselves or their kids, and another person (most likely a woman) sitting behind a sewing machine in a factory where their working hours, air quality, safety, and pay is totally at the mercy of their bosses and the insatiable demand of the customer – what really is the difference between them? That person in the factory is not less skilled, less creative; they’re using the same equipment as the sewist who would call themselves an artisan or a maker. But while the US attempts to celebrate itself for workers’ rights, its companies have simply moved production to countries whose imperialism-created poverty and unstable governments promises them cheap labor and a higher profit margin. Those companies have not been forced to become more ethical or compassionate following the labor movements in the US, they’ve simply moved their Industrial Revolution-era exploitation to places we don’t care to think about.

So when the Trump administration tries to promise the return of factory jobs and manufacturing to the US by levying tariffs, don’t think for a second that those jobs will be well-paid, union, safe, or equitable across race and gender. Hand-in-hand with Republican economics is the philosophy of deregulation, and they would have us working 16-hour days 7 days a week if they could. Nothing trickles down except for their bullshit.

Listen, I’m no working class hero. I went to private school, I have two degrees, both of my parents worked at high schools and colleges my entire life. But as I think of how to relearn crafting as labor, I look to trade unions for inspiration. Welding, carpentry, electrical engineering, plumbing – these are occupations whose practitioners have long protected themselves through unionization, and are unlikely to be replaced by automation (it’s hard to imagine inviting a robot into your home to fix or clog or painstakingly bring your wiring up to code). These are people from a legacy of hard-won battles over workers’ rights, but what has protected these while textile workers still face major exploitation and danger?

Again, I believe gender has a lot to do with it. Trades are still largely male-dominated, fomenting a culture hostile to non-men (Bridges et al., 2020). But then women are also challenged to find dignity and liberation in female-dominated labor sectors that were once at the heart of the labor movement. On top of the retaliation owners and management tend to take against striking and organizing workers, female workers are at much higher risk for gender-based violence, sexual assault, and sexual harassment, and firing a person once they become pregnant is commonplace (Robertson, 2024), leaving parents without income to support their kids and creating generational poverty. The different ways women are discriminated against makes the stakes much higher, and they can be potentially traumatized in more varied ways than their male counterparts. This is a global issue, happening here and America and the countries with even less labor regulation – countries we allow companies to operate in so they can squeeze out larger profits. And much of it, culturally, is because we don’t find “women’s work” as valuable as men’s.

I know that much of the language I’m using about gender is very binary. It’s difficult to include the labor experiences of non-binary people when labor is so separated along a binary, and that binary makes it easier to privilege the labor of one gender over all others. As women can often face gendered and sexual violence from men, TLGBQ+ workers are deal with queerphobia on top of other intersecting identities that are often discriminated against.

That’s not to say the cultures of trades isn’t changing. The IWW has a page outlining its inclusion policies. According to data recorded in 2021, more women than ever were working in the trades. While one survey by the UK Construction Industry Council showed that 1% of workers identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual, this survey did not seem to include verbiage about trans or nonbinary people. I also couldn’t find comparative data on LGBTQ+ people in the trades that showed an increase or decrease over time.

Unfortunately, cruelly, disgustingly, though, this progress is being undone by the current administration. As they seek to demonize DEI policies, gut Medicare that allows people to get affordable health care, and actively abduct workers off the street, they attempt to erode our solidarity with one another.

To the last point, ICE is a threat to everyone, undocumented or otherwise, in the US. They’ve detained US citizens without cause, arrested people who were complying with ADP (alternative detention programs), and arrested people whose visas were cancelled with no warning. Mohsan Mohdawi was arrested at his citizenship interview. ICE does this without identification, while masking their faces so that they can’t be identified and held accountable. They don’t care if a person is attempting to become a citizen “the right way”, a phrase I hear so often from people trying to qualify their fear of immigrants to only the “illegal” kind. This is race-based, state-sponsored terrorism, and it’s not new. Our governments have always deployed military-level policing to shut down progressive movements, from the early days of industry to now.

So as I write to you, fellow crafters, sewers, knitters, crocheters, weavers, I beg you to activate in favor of working people. As you engage with the hobby you love, remember the workers forced to use their crafting skills in dangerous factories for pennies. Support unions, and support the power they gain through diversity. Protect your neighbors, whoever they are, because they are not your enemy.

With LA under siege and many more cities likely to start protesting against ICE, I have to speak on this because it’s a matter of urgency. I highly recommend the Freedom for Immigrants organization and the National Immigration Law Center for more information, as they operate nationally and I don’t know where you could be reading from.

Stay safe, stay crafty, and know your rights.

June 9, 2025
Craft, Art, and Gender
What does my knitting have to do with my gender? More than I’d like. Less than you’d think.

I sometimes wonder what people assume about me when I knit in public. I wonder, and worry, if it’s assumed that I’m invested in the sort of traditional femininity that knitting seems to represent. I’ve discussed this a little in a previous post – do these so-called “alpha” manosphere assholes see knitting as a sign of the kind of woman they believe we should all be.

A clip from a manosphere Youtube channel where two men wonder if women actually have hobbies, and decide that knitting is an acceptable hobby for a woman to have because it’s “nurturing” and feminine. Don’t worry, I didn’t go to their actual YT channel to get this screenshot because I would never give them the views to poison my algorithm. Thanks to Chad Chad for taking that one for the team.

I don’t knit because I’m a woman. I don’t knit in a feminine way. I also don’t knit in a feminist, reclaiming-the-power-of-the-craft way. I knit and crochet because I like it (and probably because I’m stimming, but that’s another blog post). I look at pretty much anything I do and wonder how much of it has to do with me being a woman.

I feel best about myself when I feel feminine, but I recently realized that what I have been conditioned to understand as feminine is also what I have been conditioned to understand as beautiful. And chat, I do not feel beautiful. I also don’t feel nurturing, or supportive, or emotionally intelligent. I’m not motherly. I’ve never found traditional fulfillment in these traits or any power.

So when we think of knitting and crochet, or any fiber craft, as a feminine activity, I question if my aversion to that is personal or if there really is a larger societal misattribution happening.

Earlier this month I read an article in Art News about the burgeoning presence of fiber in the arts scene this year. “Fiber Art Has Officially Taken Over New York’s Museums and Galleries” by Alex Greenberger covers multiple exhibits, features, and retrospectives of fiber as painting and sculpture, at commercial galleries and museums like the MOMA.

Almost all the artists mentioned and profiled in the article, as might be expected, are women. Greenberger credits the phenomenon of fiber-centered exhibits to a cultural correction of misogynist exclusion:

Why so much fiber all of a sudden? The simple answer has to do with the changing face of recent art history. Weavings, embroideries, and the like have long been awarded an asterisk in the canon—if they’ve been accepted into the canon at all. Typically, art in those mediums has been classed separately as craft in the West or denigrated as “women’s work.” Thanks to the work of dedicated scholars, curators, and critics, fiber art has finally come in for reassessment.

I wrote briefly in my post about chromatic politics about the shoehorning of women artists in the Bauhaus school to textile-based art forms. And how while fiber arts and decorative arts are often relegated to the superficial, their influence on the so-called “fine arts” is hard to ignore, like that of the mostly-female weavers of the Aymara on the aesthetics of architect Freddie Mamani.

I don’t disagree with Greenberger’s theory of the gender pendulum swinging back in the direction of equity, and that the fiber art rage has been part of that. The way that the binary genders – men and women – have been separated and tiered has a lot to do with the way “art” and “craft” has been separated and tiered, which has given men a lot of fame and status and women a lot of obscurity. But I can’t help but wonder (!) what a gender utopia, a world where misogyny and queerphobia don’t exist, looks like.

I have a list of evolving, circular desires for gender and art – a gender ouroboros maybe.
- I want to see women included in “fine art” – painting, sculpture, architecture, etc. because women are capable of doing whatever they pursue.
- I love seeing “craft” and the women artists who practice it included in the genres of fine art, because craft requires the same level of technique and intellect that the traditional “fine arts” require. It’s important to me that the disciplines and materials we associate with fine art gets expanded in order to perforate the gender separation that’s been engineered in the art world.
- I don’t want to see fiber “craft” forever associated with women because not that all fiber artists are women and not all women are naturally fiber artists, and to believe so is gender essentialist in a way that gives me hives.
- To call craft “women’s work” at all is colonial. Craft exists across the globe, in virtually every culture, and not all cultures divide labor along the same gender lines. For instance, textile crafters in West Africa were often men (Osborne, 2024), but during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the white slave-owning class demanded that enslaved women perform it because it was more in line with the white/European division of labor by gender (Golden, 2023).
- Not everyone lived by a gender binary like Christian Europeans did. Numerous cultures around the world recognize more than two genders, and the various nonbinary genders in those cultures also fulfilled traditional roles. Nonbinary people have also existed in binary gender cultures forever without being recognized. To only be talking about the elevation of women’s art erases the many trans nonbinary identities that are currently under attack, even by people claiming to be feminist*.
- Even as objects previously tiered as “craft” are elevated to “art”, and artists working with materials often thought of as “craft supplies” instead of “artist materials”, are being curated for the fine arts scenes, will women and nonbinary artists be fairly represented alongside male artists without their gender or cultural background novelized alongside the medium?
*If your brand of feminism aligns with Republican/right-wing politics or if you find that Nazis are agreeing with you, then you’re not a fucking feminist.

To the last point, Greenberger makes a poignant criticism of the Woven Histories exhibit at the MOMA:

The exhibition is unclear about the ties that bind many of its artists: what, for example, links an abstract painting from the ’70s by Jack Whitten and a raffia net from the ’60s by Ed Rossbach?…The exhibition also stumbles when presenting artists awaiting canonization such as Yvonne Koolmatrie, a Ngarrindjeri weaver who makes sinuous sculptures from sedge, a type of grass. These works are…lumped together with baskets by Indigenous artists, an awkward, reductive gesture that makes them feel like an afterthought.

Here, Koolmatrie’s artistry is hitched to that of other indigenous artists with, as Greenberger suggests, no real curation as to why. Is it enough to say that “we all weave”, or does this decontextualize the places and cultures these individual artists come from? The importance of cultural specificity to art and craft cannot be overstated, and it is frequently missing from a lot of discourse about art and gender that I’ve seen and read. Race and gender are linked in systems of oppression, so they have to be discussed together in cultural criticism. After all, the Western/European art institutions that have displayed stolen precolonial indigenous art have historically not challenged the binary thinking of gender by acknowledging nonbinary artists.

I grew up near the Baltimore Museum of Art, and even as a child I could understand the way most of the exhibits were organized. These rooms, the impressionists. Over here, the impressive collection of Matisses. In this stark white and angular wing, the contemporary exhibit. And over here… “African Art.” All the art the museum had from across the continent, from across centuries, in cramped glass display cases instead of mounted on walls or installed like the European and American paintings and sculptures. Looking back on it now, this exhibit was distinctly anthropological, archeological, in nature. These were not meant to be considered cerebrally like the Monets and Warhols. I wasn’t meant to think about the objects’ makers as individuals. It was just a room full of things with a single tenuous connection between them: the 11.7 million square mile continent of origin.

Decades later, the BMA has gone through a total overhaul. That vague exhibit no longer exists. The new curators have gone full force into featuring living artists whose works they can fully contextualize. They’ve sold a number of extremely famous works (to the rage of many white patrons) to fund the acquisition of art by Black, indigenous, and queer artists. Last year, they installed “Walk a Mile in My Dreams” an exhibit dedicated to the work of Joyce J. Scott, a Baltimore artist who works in a plethora of different mediums and techniques, including fiber, weaving, and crochet. Scott’s work explores race, sexuality, violence, and natural destruction, and she’s as influenced by the cultures and artistic techniques of the many places she’s traveled as she is by her own family’s long history of making.

I haven’t visited the Woven Histories exhibit myself, so I can’t speak personally to the level of explanation provided by the curator as to the connection between the different works, but it sounds like more specific context is needed to draw these connections. Maybe it takes an artist-specific installation, like “Walk a Mile in My Dreams”, to fully do justice to any artist.

I have been thinking about my relationship to my gender for my entire life, and Greenberger’s article gave me a great vehicle to talk about it in relationship to the fiber crafts that have become such a big part of my day-to-day life (and my livelihood, at one point). This hobby, once necessary labor in a preindustrial age, taken for granted as “women’s work”; this women’s work that my own 94-year-old meat-and-potatoes mans’ man Navy veteran grandfather was taught as a boy; this women’s work that I have seen loved by cis men, gay and straight; this women’s work that I have seen relished by trans and non-binary people at fiber festivals.

Even though us cis women are overrepresented in fiber arts, they don’t belong to us, and that makes me feel free. It’s not enough that I should feel empowered by the things that make me “feminine” – I want a femininity that demands nothing of me. The gender utopia I hope for is a decolonized one, a non-binary one. One where every singular person is recognized for their skills and artistry no matter their identity, without it having to reflect on anyone else.
May 25, 2025

Tag: lgbt

Craft, Trade, and Labor

Craft, Art, and Gender