How Does a Knitted Vagina Work? The Craftivist Response to Current Political Issues through the Utilization of Historically Feminine Crafts
This thesis explores how historically women’s crafts such as needlework and fiber arts have informed acts of political protest with a focus on the craftivist response to contemporary women’s reproductive rights surrounding the Supreme Court Burwell v. Hobby Lobby decision (2014). Individuals and organized groups, including Government Free VJJ: Project Snatchel, Knit a Brick, and Wombs on Washington responded to the attempts and legalization of restricting women’s reproductive freedom. I am interested in how contemporary craftivism utilizes the historically feminine mediums of fiber-based craft to further social awareness of political feminine issues. INDEX WORDS: Craftivism, Activism, Knitting, Gender, Women’s Rights, Pro-Choice HOW DOES A KNITTED VAGINA WORK? THE CRAFTIVIST RESPONSE TO CURRENT POLITCAL ISSUES THROUGH THE UTILIZATION OF HISTORICALLY FEMININE CRAFTS
Tactics and technology: cultural resistance at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp
My dissertation examines women's unique techniques and cultures of communication at the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp in Newbury, England between 1982-1985. Often referred to by participants as one of the "last movements before the internet," I look at Greenham as a site through which to think about how activists' communication and cultural practices in the 1980s shaped activist uses of the worldwide web and other new media technologies central to contemporary struggles. I argue that social movement media such as videos, newsletters, postcards, songs and songbooks both create movement culture at the time of their production, and carry movement ideas and their infrastructures into the future. A story told orally, a songbook, a manifesto, a recorded interview, a picture of a mass demonstration, all circulate across time and space. Through this movement, ideas and artifacts are transformed and incorporated as different people encounter and make meaning out of these cultural texts in different ways.%%%%Ma dissertation considere les methodes uniques de communication de femmes activistes lors du Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp de Newbury, Angleterre, de 1982 a 1985. Greenham, que les participantes ont souvent appele la premiere phase des derniers mouvements avant Internet, est un site permettant de penser la communication et les pratiques culturelles aux fins militantes des annees 1980, dans un contexte d'usages activistes du Web et autres technologies nouveaux medias cruciales aux debats contemporains. J'affirme que les medias de mouvement social comme la video, le bulletin d'information, les cartes postales, les chansons et les recueils de chansons creent une culture de mouvement au moment de leur production, et amenent ensuite les idees de ces mouvements et de leur infrastructure dans le futur. Une histoire racontee, un recueil de chansons, un manifeste, une entrevue enregistree, une photo d'une manifestation circulent tous dans le temps et l'espace. A l'aide de cette mobilite, les idees et les artefacts se transforment et s'incorporent au fur et a mesure que les gens decouvrent et donnent differents sens a ces textes culturels.
Nuclear Nights: The Women's Peace Movement and the History of Dreaming
This paper draws on materialist theories of dreaming to contextualise records of nightmares about nuclear war from the early 1980s British and North American womens peace movement, in particular the dreams recorded in Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirks book Greenham Women Everywhere (1983). Such nightmares do not only suggest evidence of collective dreaming but provide a remarkable case of the collective interpretation of dreams as they were taken up as a basis for political action. It concludes that in particular historical contexts, dreams can be especially visible indications of a political unconscious and, encouraged by feminist recognition of emotional life, of the unconscious as a political resource.