Precarious craft: a feminist commodity chain analysis

ABSTRACT

It is common in do-it-yourself (DIY), craft and craftivism circles to uncritically celebrate female-gendered labours. An almost-essential component of DIY-craft narratives in developed countries positions this work as resisting capitalism. Rather than dismissing these narratives as quintessentially neoliberal, which they are, this article argues that they offer important insights about the relationships between narrative, migration, precarity and feminised labour. The article takes up Priti Ramamurthy’s six elements of a feminist commodity chain analysis to situate craft workers in the United States and globally as members of the global precariat, while considering both their real lives and how they are imagined. I add to a growing body of theorists working to expand craft theory by arguing that crafting labours, and the narratives that characterize them, offer an important site to consider how migration, precarity and gendered labour are perceived. This article fills a gap in the literature of migration by examining how realist and fictional narratives of craft operate to reify and resist the institutionalized forms of oppression that intersect to produce precarity and migration. Ultimately, this article examines how craft narratives might more effectively foreground connections between craft workers worldwide and how that might shift perceptions of migration and precarity.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist commodity chain analysis
• precarity
• craftivism
• do-it-yourself (DIY)
• global feminised labour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These narratives appear elsewhere, such as Craft Magazine, Readymade, blogs, as well as the forward to many instruction books. Although there are more recent examples available, the narratives in Handmade Nation are characteristic of current examples. These narratives, collected across the United States, are a larger sample than other volumes.

2. I differentiate DIY-crafters from professional artisans and labourers making craft in contexts of mass-production, although these categorical distinctions are anything but crisp.

3. Curators, writers, scholars, practitioners and other professionals differentiate craft work between ‘high’ and ‘low’ skill, where men – especially white men – have and continue to dominate the professional echelon of craft. Women and (crafters of colour) who practice similar trades either did so within the domestic sphere and received less attention and compensation. Or, they have occupied a much smaller percentage of the tradespeople who are considered professional, craftsman or artisan.

4. Wallace writes, ‘Based on my field research, they foreground which representations rise to the surface and are reproduced as particularly fashionable, cool and, arguably, fetishized under a hipster aesthetic and aspirational taste culture of a largely white, upwardly mobile, urban middle class’ (2014, p. 143).

5. For more on this phenomenon, although not directly related to craft, see Zygmunt Bauman’s Consuming Life. Glenn Adamson also writes of Tracy Emin’s art as ‘[replicating] herself as a highly successful commodity’ (2007, p. 161).

6. Ramamurthy explains her inclusion of a catalogue as an analytical tool thusly, ‘The close reading of the catalogue of a U.S. multinational corporation demonstrates that the global commodity chain is not linear, unidirectional, and closed; it is constantly opened-up and refracted even as it weaves subjects from a range of social positions and locations into the fabric of consent’ (2004, p. 750). Similarly, DIY narratives (such as Handmade Nation) also open up and refract the global commodity chain as the flow of recycled and repurposed materials is anything but linear, one-directional, or closed. The volume also weaves crafting subjects ‘into the fabric of consent.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suzanne C. Schmidt

Suzanne Schmidt is an interdisciplinary scholar and educator based in Oakland, CA. Her research examines contemporary do-it-yourself crafting narratives and the role of crafting labors in domestic fiction and multi-ethnic American literature. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington and is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is the Director of Education for the Social Justice Sewing Academy, where she consults on teaching and learning strategies for their workshops and public programs. She was a 2016-17 Citizenship Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She is currently working on a book chapter titled “Craft as a Pedagogy of Hope.”