Photo: Julie Hollenbach.

A.4.1 Whose Personal is Political? Troubling Privileged Affect in White Feminist Craftivism

Julie Hollenbach, NSCAD University

This paper presents an intersectional feminist analysis of craftivism; the social movement where dissent is expressed through crafty forms of activism by individuals and collectives alike. Through examining craftivism, my paper considers how amateur crafting practices are tied fundamentally to the maker’s sense of self, and how that self is connected to local and global social formations and circumstances. Furthermore, as craftivist culture leans heavily into gendered ideologies of labour and material, my paper assesses amateur textile’s bourgeois and feminine associations with the soft, the gentle, and the domestic, and how these associations strongly impact craftivism’s mobilization as a non-violent form of protest. Craftivism’s emphasis on either a traditional femininity or an uncritical essentialist feminism reproduces many of the pitfalls that faced women’s rights activists in the 1970s. Where white feminists aimed to disrupt the patriarchal hegemony and claim public space by demanding that their ‘personal is political,’ Black women and women of Colour have always occupied the public sphere through labour and have had their voices, their feelings, and their bodies forcibly policed or erased. Craftivism seems to be limited not only to the people who have the resources (time and money) to craft, but the luxury to express their dissent publicly in a gentle, non-violent manner. For many people – racialized, disabled, and poor people especially, and often through the intersections of oppression, queer and transgender people – protest is dangerous because it presses on their lives through the reality of systemic oppression which is insidiously and brutally violent. A call for craftivism to become more intersectional and reflexive in its analyses and application is beginning to take hold, though it remains to be seen whether craftivism will shift to respond to these challenges, or stagnate and give way to a different form of radicalized expression mobilized through textiles and craft.

A.4.2 Towards Queer Futures: Making Art with Activist Archives

Emily Davidson, NSCAD University

I will present a body of artwork currently under development in which I engage political imagination by reapproaching queer resistance images through embroidery and quilting. These artworks are connected to a body of research guided by the questions: Are there practices that participate in the formation of queer futures and what characterizes these practices? Moreover, can these practices resist cooption by neoliberal colonial capitalism? My artworks aim to investigate fault lines in neoliberal colonial capitalism and activate any potential energy left by traces of past activism at these fault lines. Specifically, I investigate and redeploy protest imagery and activist graphic design from North American gay and lesbian social movements during the Western AIDS epidemic prior to 1996. In doing so I explore the archival turn (Kate Eichhorn) in activism and interrogate how archives and artistic institutions such as museums, galleries and universities limit and order radical queer materials. The work queers and complicates protest art by mixing images from the past and present which are variously activist, archival, pop-culture, personal, symbolic, and abstract. I aim reveal some of the ways queer futures are formed and to provide glimpses of possibilities for how activist and artistic processes might resist cooption by neoliberal colonial capitalism.

A.4.3 Queering Space? Tensions between Ethics and Aesthetics in Activist Approaches to Design

Olivier Vallerand, Arizona State University

Definitions of “queer” vary greatly, from activist to theoretical to mainstream discourses. In turn, architectural theorists, historians, and practitioners have used “queer space” to discuss both political challenges to architectural education and disciplinary knowledge and aesthetic challenges to formal conventions. Through an analysis of essays, exhibitions, and performances, this paper explores how queer space thinking in architectural discourse has developed following different ethical or aesthetical objectives since its emergence in the 1980s.

Early queer space thinkers such as John Paul Ricco, Henry Urbach and Aaron Betsky explicitly contrasted the objectives of their approaches. Similarly, the Storefront “Queer Space” exhibition (1994) deliberately asked its participants to address how they defined queer space, exploring as much the use of public space by gay and lesbian people than the creation of safer domestic space. In parallel, the Organization of Lesbian and Gay Architects and Designers and other groups were both fighting for better visibility and representation and supporting victims of the AIDS pandemic. More recently, practitioners such as MYCKET have explored the productive tensions in thinking about queerness as a project of either aesthetic or ethic.

The paper thus focuses on untangling how architects and designers link queer political activism and queer theory, highlighting, challenging or reinforcing the difficult relation between formal and social critiques. Building on the idea that challenges to traditional forms of designing or writing highlight the social normativity of those forms, many have sought to propose new ways of thinking about how one experiences space. Through a comparison with how feminist and race scholars have approached similar tensions, I argue for a renewed focus on identifying how queer space activists have explicitly framed their objectives – or avoided to do so – to productively understand the limits and successes of queer approaches.