Skip to page content...

View Submissions

Please choose an option:


Title of Abstract:

Handcraft and the Tranformation of Exchange (Ref #229)

Date:
27-10-2006 15:17:53
Status:
Accepted
Rating:
8
Details:
My work is an ethnographic study of the DIY craft movement in the US. With my background in theatre studies I use the language and methodological tools of performance to articulate the transformative potential that contemporary embodied craft practices generate for individuals and communities. When one 'performs' craft, one collects and combines materials, gestures, patterns, and (frequently) relationships in order to fashion and furnish a self to occupy. By emphasizing the performance of craft and the way that self and group
performances are themselves crafted and recrafted, I see the crafter as continually unfolding bodies of work that are at once everyday and extraordinary, private and public, ad-hoc and rehearsed. The working-out of the body of work, then, can provide new articulative possibilities for the crafter in her/his negotiations with a community, notions of culture, and economic structures and processes.

In this paper I discuss three sites converging around private and public economies. This focus stems from two observations: first, a conversation I had with a work-at-home mother and craft business owner who said she and likeminded women were participating in "the American Dream?or a revision of it"; second, a fascination with the slippery,
subversive, sometimes accidentally innovative relations between crafters and conventional commerce that are fostered online. One idea that characterizes DIY crafters of the moment is the impetus to revise and renew economic patterns and assumptions; in doing, crafters both casually and carefully philosophize their labor and use the web as a
virtual extension of their selves. The first site I discuss is
Crafters United, an online grassroots response to Hurricane Katrina in the form of a charitable auction of handcrafted goods; participants used craft to perform generosity and construct a liveable relationship to tragedy. Second, I engage two craft business owners, one working at home and one from a storefront, and compare how these women interact with regulations, notions of self-branding, and gender presumptions. Finally, I will examine Craft Congress, a gathering taking place in April 2007 but the planning for which is unfolding online now; this event is meant to self-consciously centralize discussion about the locally-driven DIY craft fairs around the US towards critique and improvement. A key theoretical framework comes from JK Gibson-Graham, who suggest possible enacted economies without capitalist structures as the starting point. Another key framework is
the narrative theoretical potency of crafters themselves, who perform stories with words, objects, and relationships.

Reviewer Comments:

Review #1 : Left on 30-10-2006 10:21:25 #
I look forward to reading the paper.

8
Review #2 : Left on 21-11-2006 00:21:12 #
A timely and fresh addition to the debate.

8
Review #3 : Left on 09-03-2007 11:51:20 #
It will be interesting to read how the argument and the methods work together, and what results derive. My slight concern is the the depth of discussion that can be achieved in one paper when referencing three sites and two key theoretical frameworks.

7

Public Comments:

Comment left by Gloria on 08-04-2007 16:13:31 #
We just concluded the Craft Congress here in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Please let me know if you have any questions, it was a fabulous experience on a variety of levels.

We had 50 diy leaders, most from the US, three from Toronto and one from Leeds.

Gloria
gtforouzan (at) gmail (dot) come