*CFP* "WOMEN'S CRAFT WORK", SPECIAL ISSUE, MAI: FEMINIMS VISUAL CULTURE

Artistry of exquisite skill and creativity has often been belittled by the label of ‘craft’. In the West we have developed a distinction between art - the result of individual (male) genius - and craft, seen as a collective, anonymous and possibly even monotonous activity: women’s work. While there have been many revivals of interest in crafts, from the Arts and Crafts Movement in the late nineteenth-century to the Etsy-powered ‘mumpreneurs’ of our contemporary moment, craft has conserved associations with the domestic rather than with public space, consigned to the private, feminine realm and barred from the value and status of art.

In the 1970s, feminist artists turned to craft precisely in order to overturn this association, using women’s work in protest: ‘feminists in their embroidery showed that the personal was the political - that personal and domestic life is as much the product of the institutions and ideologies of our society as is public life’ (Parker 1984: 205). In so doing, artists such as Kate Walker and Judy Chicago drew upon a history of craft as protest that includes the banners stitched by suffragettes (Hunter 2019: 128-9). Surrealist artists, such as Dorothea Tanning and Louise Bourgeois had also incorporated textiles and sewing into unnerving, surrealist pieces that explored unconscious desire through the wry use of ‘women’s work’. Faith Ringgold’s narrative quilts used African American quilting techniques to give voice to stories of slavery and racial oppression.

More recently, feminist scholars (Cvetkovich, Berlant et al) have argued that many of the personal pathologies of our age should be understood political, a way of thinking the personal as political in a neoliberal age that undermines the binary between private and public: ‘what if depression could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion and everyday segregation?’ asks Ann Cvetkovich (2006: 115), arguing that, ‘the intimate rituals of daily life, where depression is embedded, need to be understood as a public arena … a location that doesn’t always get recognised as public but which nonetheless functions as such’ (156).

Cvetkovich further advocates for ‘crafting’s redefinition of what counts as politics to include sensory interactions with highly tactile spaces and with other people - or, in other words, feelings’ (177). Craft, with its repetitive gestures, inscribing itself always in a collective history and movement, could form the basis of a ‘utopia of everyday habit’, countering slow death, with slow living.

This resonates with the notion of ‘craftivism’, advocated by activists such as Betsy Greer and Sarah Corbett, who conceive of craft as a gentle, thoughtful mode of activism that replaces unthinking quick reactions with thoughtful, slow gestures, and helps to preserve the maker from the violence of activism fatigue.

Might we rethink our scholarly and critical approach to visual culture through such concepts of craft?

Essays and creative responses might address:

• Critical approaches to visual culture made with traditional ‘craft’ techniques such as sewing, quilting, knitting, crochet, etc. 
• Film as craft - montage, editing, animation (e.g. Lotte Reiniger), set design, 
• Craft as protest, collective crafting 
• Craft as healing, repair, mending 
• Women artists who work with crafting techniques such as Judy 
• Chicago, Frida Hansen, Else-Marie Jakobsen, Eva Hesse, Tracey Emin - to name a few… 
• Feminist recuperations of traditional crafting techniques such as knitting, weaving and embroidery. 
• Interviews with practitioners

Please send abstracts of 300 words for the attention of Dr. Isabelle Mcneill and Dr. Anna Backman Rogers to contact@maifeminism.com by November 25th.