Discussion slides for CCR 711: Rhetorics of Craft

1. CCR 711: Rhetorics of Craft
Nov. 5, 2013
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2. Is this rhetorical?
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3. Wednesday, November 6, 13

4. Wednesday, November 6, 13

5. Wednesday, November 6, 13

6. Why is is this an ethical
issue in the field?
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7. material rhetorics
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8. gendered crafts
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9. The world of the needle... [has been] seen as trivial by
some because it is ubiquitously and uncritically
associated with women’s domestic work, ad demeaning
and oppressive by many early feminist scholars who
derided or shunned it, and as less than art and so less
worthy of attention by still other scholars who avoided
it. (1-2)
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10. Outside the capitalist marketplace where the male
weaver and male tailor became increasingly the norm,
women have been both materially and ideologically
associated with the making, repairing, and cleaning of
clothes. In other words, within the world of the needle
as elsewhere, men were understood to create, women
to mend and tidy up” (Goggin 40-41).
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11. Are worked cloth and
thread a text?
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12. Wednesday, November 6, 13

13. “And yet, Parker herself begins her text in silken ink
with the words “As I cannot write” (Goggin, 37).
Especially essential for their education was to learn
how to sew, because “knowing how to sew for a
woman is equivalent to knowing how to write for
men.” (Campagnol, 169)
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14. what claims are useful for
bringing this within the
purview of the field?
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15. Craft and Bodily
Knowledge (again)
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16. “The power to perform magic with a needle comes
through the embroiderer’s familiarity with stitches: with
their structure, with hand movements required to make
them and with their seemingly infinite
variation” (Wearden, qtd on 4).
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17. Thus, bodily knowledge is as important, if not more so,
than vision and cognitive knowledge in embroidery -the feel of the fabric, thread, and needle, as well as the
movement of the hand, require a kinetic familiarity. ... A
needleworker ... needs to know how to read and write
the fabric via the mind and body. ... Hence, there are
several kinds of epistemologies in the praxis of
needlework and textiles: a bodily knowing, a cognitive
know-how, and a resulting epistemology. (4-5)
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18. Craft and Identification
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19. consubstantiality
exoticizing
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24. Craft as Discipline
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25. women’s dangerous
idleness
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26. crafting as social strategy
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27. needlework as
tripartite community
strategy
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