On Why Knitting Is Bad Ass

I usually don't respond to inflammatory things on the internet, mostly because I doubt that I have anything relevant to add to the discussion, and also because I don't believe in baiting trolls. Peg Aloi, over at the Huffington Post, writes one of the most condescending and insulting articles on feminism that I've ever read: it's irritating enough to bring me out of my self-imposed blog hiatus. The article laments the rise of a performatively 'femme' feminism coupled with a return to the domestic. I knew the article was going to be bad from the fourth sentence, which reads, "Even BUST magazine is sponsoring a craft fair in NYC." I'm not entirely sure why this is news, since BUST's E-i-C is Debbie Stoller of Stitch'n'Bitch fame, and Stitch'n'Bitch happened nearly ten years ago, but apparently putting some effort into researching her topic wasn't something Aloi wanted to do.

Aloi's central point seems to be that being interested in anything feminine or girly makes one unable to be a "badass, strong, tough woman." Cupcakes are out, as are heirloom tomatoes and Hello Kitty; these are seen as signs of complacency. Being interested in these things apparently means that we have given up the fight, and that when the revolution comes, we'll be lolling around eating bonbons in our high heeled shoes. Our time would be better spent "learning how to shoot a gun, hot-wire a car, and manipulate our way into a bomb shelter." My first question there is why those particular skills would be useful (in fact, I'm pretty sure basic survival skills, like gathering, shelter building, and fire starting would probably be more useful, come the apocalypse), but I'm also not sure how knowing how to knit impedes my ability to do *any* of those things.

Aloi's arguments bother me in general because they're built on lazy generalizations and pat explanations, and they also bother me in particular because my idea of myself as a feminist (and, accordingly, the way that I negotiate the world as a white, middle class feminist) is so central to my identity. (In fact, one of my student evals from last year took issue with my "feminist viewpoint".) Despite the fact that I have completed16 different knitting projects this year, I am not complacent about the obstacles that women face in society. I'm a young woman with a sizable chest who teaches at a university; I've had men say to me, "Oh, if my college professors had looked like you, I'd have paid more attention." I have to work hard to be taken seriously. Being a feminist is important to me; I believe that I have an obligation to interrogate the world as I find it and to work towards a society that is both more equal and more just. And I'm one of the lucky ones--I come from a position of privilege, and I know it.

Where does knitting fit into this? A better question to ask might be, Why is knitting an UNfeminist thing to do? Because it's "old"? Because it's domestic? Because it privileges the home? For my part, I've actually learned more about women's bodies from being a knitter. I've also learned a lot about discourses of power through the various groups that I'm involved in on Ravelry. Knitting isn't an inherently feminist act by any means, but I choose it as one. A big part of feminism for me is defying people's expectations of who and what I should be: a knitter who is a gamer who is a writer who likes to cook who used to blacksmith who would like to take up archery...you get the picture.

If it's not her kind of feminism, that's fine. What's not fine is this reductive feminism (descended, perhaps, from the second wavers?) that wants to limit the value of women to certain occupations and hobbies that are deemed "worthy" of our time and attention purely because they are masculine and therefore "bad ass".

Here are 5 knitting projects that I think are quite bad ass (some NSFW):

• Seamless Willie Warmer
• Know Your Mushrooms Blanket
• Fornicating Reindeer Chart
• Skull Isle Hat
• Dark Mark Illusion Scarf
  

I Sing the Body Pathetic

I recently finished a cute, lace up cardigan from French Girl Knits called "Wrenna". I had to modify the pattern since I used a different yarn, but the end result is quite pleasing, and I was pretty excited to wear it today for the first time. The sweater is black, so I paired it with a pale lavender tank top, grey jeans, and grey ballet flats, and felt very pleased with myself for being so stylish. (I also only had a lavender ribbon to use for the lacing, so it worked quite well.) My hair is pretty much at the perfect length right now, and it has been behaving very nicely these last few weeks.


Then I got to work, and had two separate people ask me if I was pregnant. (If you are wondering, I am not.) I blame this squarely on the empire waist tank top: Empire waists do nothing for a shape like mine, because they fall in a way that emphasizes the widest part of my body while ignoring the parts that taper. Like my actual waist. It is a terrible look for me--I guess I thought that the inherent cuteness and good shape of the Wrenna would counteract the tank top. No such luck.


What's most surprising about this, I guess, is how upset I am as a result. I've done my fair share of feminist theory, and I know all about body politics and the like; I don't think you can be a feminist on the internet without coming in to contact with these ideas at some point or other. One of my favourite units to teach back in my high school teachin' days was the critical media studies unit on gender in the media. (Plus I'm a knitter, and there's nothing like being actively involved in making your own clothing to make you understand how totally arbitrary sizing and notions of body shape are.) I try my best to advocate accepting your body as it is, and acknowledging our cultural standards of beauty as problematic and unrealistic. I know how difficult popular culture makes navigating this world if you don't fit into these preconceived notions of what a woman's shape should be, but I guess I've always sort of thought that I was above all that.


It turns out I'm not above it at all. The pregnancy question has me obsessing over my weight. I keep wondering, Am I fat? I sneak glances at myself in the windows in the hallways at work; I examine my reflection in the mirrors in the washroom; I bemoan the lack of a full-length mirror at home where I can see my whole body.


I know I'm not fat. I know I'm not skinny, either, and I know that I really shouldn't weigh much less than what I weigh right now.* My body isn't shaped to be much smaller than it is right now: My hips are always going to be wide; I'm always going to be chesty; I am always going to be curvy. (I'm pretty sure this comes from my dad's family--the M----rs all have crazy metabolisms. Thanks a lot, Dad's genetic line!) I don't think my body is perfect (there are loads of things about it that I don't love, but that's another essay for another time) but there's certainly nothing wrong with it. So why, then, am I all in a tizzy over this idea that I look like I could be pregnant (which my mind has turned, by extention, into looking fat)?

It's just interesting to me, I guess, to come into such close contact with my own failings. I'm quite surprised that this upsets me that much, but it does. I don't know that I'd go quite so far as to call it hypocrisy on my part, but some days it really feels like the older I get, the more I discover that I keep falling short of the person I like to think that I am.

*I kept writing additional sentences to qualify this statement, about how I have winter weight and could stand to lose 5-10 lbs., but have opted to avoid saying those since I have a normal weight for my height/age and a normal BMI. Funny how even as I say that I'm happy with my body, I'm still nitpicking the details, isn't it?

Perhaps I've been going about it all wrong

The difficulties of hacking through the Gordian knot I've made of knitting and politics have been weighing on me; I've made little progress in terms of figuring out what I might like to make for the art show. It's the same crippling thought that has bogged up much of my creative writing for the last few years: everything I think of always seems so hopelessly derivative.

Then Karie passed on a link that has made me see that perhps the problem is not with me, but the way in which I am considering art as resistance and knitting as politics. Anna, of Knitting, Sex and God, writes:

What I have enjoyed about the 100 Objects series so far is that it is collapsing distinctions between ‘art’, ‘craft’, ‘tools’, ‘technology’, etc. The only criterion is that each object is an artefact – made by human beings. The semantic awkwardness there is significant – the words that easily slip in the structure of our language are ‘man-made’ – made by men, or with men representative of the whole of humanity. The whole traditional men/women, culture/nature division is particularly significant as regards ‘thingyness’, because men ‘make’ and women ‘generate’, men invent things and make decisions and get them done, whereas women give birth. Or the things that women make traditionally – textiles, food, domestic items – aren’t as valued as those of men: they are craft, not art; tools, not technology.

Feminism hasn’t always done as well as it might in trying to redress the neglect of ‘women’s things’: having diagnosed the culture/nature dualism, it has often wanted to choose one side of the divide rather than to dissolve it. So you have a disembodiedly intellectual kind of feminism that is dismissive of activities such as cooking or embroidery, versus the spiritual feminism saturated in the imagery of the natural, untouched by the social – moon, sea, soil, etc, speaking of ‘technology’ as the evil tool of patriarchy that has subjugated women and the earth. Or feminist reclamation of traditional female crafts has tended to romanticise them as being closer to the natural and part of women’s birth-giving capacities, rather than part of the general human project of negotiating the world through tools and objects that are useful and beautiful.

There's quite a lot going on there. To start with, Anna brings up the word "man-made" as significant; I would also add that the objects women produced are more often referred to as being "handmade," which is a term loaded with solipsisms, conjuring up images of macaroni picture frames and pinecone bird feeders on one hand, or expensive, "Fair Trade" wooden bowls carved in a Third World county on the other. Anna goes on to talk about the divide between intellectual vs. spiritual feminism, which in some ways reinforces this solipsism.

I think that I need to stop thinking about knitting as resistance in terms of capital P Politics, and start thinking about where knitting sits in terms of the politics of feminism, and in what ways my position as a [third wave] feminist and knitter resists, subverts, conforms, or defies this feminism.