Soft Circuitry: Methods for Queer and Trans Feminist Maker Movements

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dc.contributor.advisorKing, Katieen_US
dc.contributor.authorRogers, Melissa Susanen_US
dc.contributor.departmentWomen's Studiesen_US
dc.contributor.publisherDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_US
dc.contributor.publisherUniversity of Maryland (College Park, Md.)en_US
dc.date.accessioned2018-01-23T06:35:54Z
dc.date.available2018-01-23T06:35:54Z
dc.date.issued2017en_US
dc.description.abstractFiber craft practices such as knitting, crochet, quilting, embroidery, and weaving have been used as experimental, hands-on methods for queer and trans feminist knowledge production, especially since the 1970s and 80s when feminist art movements in the United States were thriving. “Soft Circuitry: Methods for Queer and Trans Feminist Maker Cultures” tracks do-it-yourself (DIY) knowledge through contemporary feminist art praxis and high-tech maker movements, demonstrating how overlapping communities of practice use the language and techniques of craft in order to make sense of their worlds. Queer and trans fiber artists use craft in order to create historiographical interventions in the mechanisms of canonization, thereby reimagining what artistic and educational institutions might look like. At the same time, the commercialized maker movement purportedly seeks to democratize technology while transforming education, manufacturing, and war through “making”: a hybrid of art, craft, and machine-assisted fabrication, encompassing a vast array of construction techniques. Combining feminized skills such as sewing with new digital technologies for physical computing, wearable electronic textiles, and soft circuitry, maker education seeks to attract girls and women to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, incorporating them into the official narrative that the U.S. is a “Nation of Makers.” This nationalist narrative simultaneously excludes others from its narrow definitions of creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. I argue that the theories, methods, and conceptual tools that have been prototyped and iterated by generations of queer and trans feminists can be used to refigure the maker movement, which has a longstanding, yet devalued, relationship with craft. By attending to intergenerational feminist dialogues about craft and identity, recent art activist projects that queer digital technologies in order to create safer worlds for trans people of color, and my own fiber craft practice, I demonstrate that present-day maker cultures are active sites of transformation and feminist intervention. Borrowed from maker movements, the language of soft circuitry suggests useful metaphors for doing speculative feminist materialism. Feminist craft praxis functions as a soft circuit: a technological pathway or schematic for feeling our way toward newly habitable worlds and ways of being.en_US
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.13016/M20Z70Z3Z
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/20310
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledLGBTQ studiesen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledGender studiesen_US
dc.subject.pqcontrolledArt historyen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledcontemporary arten_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledcraften_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledfeminismen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledmaker movementsen_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledqueeren_US
dc.subject.pquncontrolledtechnologyen_US
dc.titleSoft Circuitry: Methods for Queer and Trans Feminist Maker Movementsen_US
dc.typeDissertationen_US

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