Queering the Subversive Stitch

Author: Joseph McBrinn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472578066
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
The history of men's needlework has long been considered a taboo subject. This is the first book ever published to document and critically interrogate a range of needlework made by men. It reveals that since medieval times men have threaded their own needles, stitched and knitted, woven lace, handmade clothes, as well as other kinds of textiles, and generally delighted in the pleasures and possibilities offered by all sorts of needlework. Only since the dawn of the modern age, in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, did needlework become closely aligned with new ideologies of the feminine. Since then men's needlework has been read not just as feminising but as queer. In this groundbreaking study Joseph McBrinn argues that needlework by male artists as well as anonymous tailors, sailors, soldiers, convalescents, paupers, prisoners, hobbyists and a multitude of other men and boys deserves to be looked at again. Drawing on a wealth of examples of men's needlework, as well as visual representations of the male needleworker, in museum collections, from artist's papers and archives, in forgotten magazines and specialist publications, popular novels and children's literature, and even in the history of photography, film and television, he surveys and analyses many of the instances in which “needlemen” have contested, resisted and subverted the constrictive ideals of modern masculinity. This audacious, original, carefully researched and often amusing study, demonstrates the significance of needlework by men in understanding their feelings, agency, identity and history.

A Companion to Textile Culture

Author: Jennifer Harris
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118768906
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Book Description
A lively and innovative collection of new and recent writings on the cultural contexts of textiles The study of textile culture is a dynamic field of scholarship which spans disciplines and crosses traditional academic boundaries. A Companion to Textile Culture is an expertly curated compendium of new scholarship on both the historical and contemporary cultural dimensions of textiles, bringing together the work of an interdisciplinary team of recognized experts in the field. The Companion provides an expansive examination of textiles within the broader area of visual and material culture, and addresses key issues central to the contemporary study of the subject. A wide range of methodological and theoretical approaches to the subject are explored—technological, anthropological, philosophical, and psychoanalytical, amongst others—and developments that have influenced academic writing about textiles over the past decade are discussed in detail. Uniquely, the text embraces archaeological textiles from the first millennium AD as well as contemporary art and performance work that is still ongoing. This authoritative volume: Offers a balanced presentation of writings from academics, artists, and curators Presents writings from disciplines including histories of art and design, world history, anthropology, archaeology, and literary studies Covers an exceptionally broad chronological and geographical range Provides diverse global, transnational, and narrative perspectives Included numerous images throughout the text to illustrate key concepts A Companion to Textile Culture is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, instructors, and researchers of textile history, contemporary textiles, art and design, visual and material culture, textile crafts, and museology.

Subversive Cross Stitch

Author: Julie Jackson
Publisher: powerHouse Books
ISBN: 1576877558
Category : Crafts & Hobbies
Languages : en
Pages : 121

Book Description
Julie Jackson is back and more subversive than ever! This new anniversary edition of her classicSubversive Cross Stitchcelebrates more than 10 years of delightfully snarky, in-your-face cross stitch with 50 full-color patterns including17 brand-new designs, such as "Don't Be Such A Baby" and "Cheer Up, Loser." Subversive Cross Stitch: 50 F*cking Clever Designs For Your Sassy Sideinvites stitchers of all levels to fully express their bad-ass crafty selves, whether they need to release their inner curmudgeon or let fly with a witty insult. With alphabet charts and easy-to-follow instructions for every design,Subversive Cross Stitch: 50 F*cking Clever Designs For Your Sassy Sideincludes everything you need to get your craft on from the original instigator of subversive stitching.

Fray

Author: Julia Bryan-Wilson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226077829
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 335

Book Description
In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval. Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions. The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.

Her Body and Other Parties

Author: Carmen Maria Machado
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979807
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction “[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange.”—Roxane Gay “In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women’s memories and hunger and desire. I couldn’t put it down.”—Karen Russell In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella “Especially Heinous,” Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

Extra/Ordinary

Author: Maria Elena Buszek
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822347628
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
Artists, critics, curators, and scholars develop theories of craft in relation to art, chronicle how fine art institutions understand and exhibit craft media, and offer accounts of activist crafting.

Byzantine Silk on the Silk Roads

Author: Sarah E. Braddock Clarke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350099325
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
With over 200 color illustrations, Byzantine Silk on the Silk Roads examines in detail the eclectic iconography of the Byzantine period and its impact on design and creativity today. Through an examination of the extraordinary variety of designs in these captivating silks, an international team of experts reveal that Byzantine culture was ever-moving and open to diverse influences across the length of the Silk Road. Commentaries from curators at key collections – including the Museum of Arts, Boston, the Smithsonian (Cooper Hewitt), the V&A and the Vatican – reveal the spread of silk embroidery and designs from East to West, and from West to East, from China to Rome, and from Constantinople to Korea. Drawing on exclusive imagery from worldwide collections within museums, churches and archives as case studies, their analysis of these unique woven silks explores the relationship between color and power, material culture and status, and offers broader insight into Byzantine culture, trade, society and ceremony. Byzantine Silk ... takes us on a journey from the past to the present, too, where Byzantine story-telling and image-making is revisited, through color, imagery and pattern, in contemporary fashion collections. Exploring Byzantine culture through a contemporary filter, the book shows how the Byzantine era still influences textile and fashion designers today in their choices of materials and colors, and their utilization of images and patterns, acting as a unique source of inspiration to designers and creators in the 21st century.

Suffrage and the Arts

Author: Miranda Garrett
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135001186X
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
Suffrage and the Arts re-establishes the central role that artistic women and men-from jewellers, portrait painters, embroiderers, through to retailers of 'artistic' products-played in the suffrage campaign in the British Isles. As political individuals, they were foot soldiers who helped sustain the momentum of the movement and as designers, makers and sellers they spread the message of the campaign to new local, national and international audiences, mediating how suffrage activism was understood by society at large. Published to coincide with the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which granted the vote to women over the age of thirty meeting a property qualification, this edited collection offers a range of new perspectives and readings of the outpouring of creative responses to the campaign. Contributors, who include historians, art historians, curators, museum professionals and suffrage experts, call upon the historiographical developments of the last thirty years, alongside new archival discoveries, to showcase the vibrancy of ongoing research in this area. Throughout, chapters investigate the wider socio-cultural backdrop to suffrage and the women's movement, the difficult choices that were made between professional, artistic aspirations and political commitment, and how institutional and informal networks influenced creative expression and participation in feminist politics. From shining light on the use of portraiture to bolster the cultural cachet of the militant Women's Social and Political Union, uncovering the links between Victorian interior design, enterprise and suffrage, through to questioning the supposed conservativism of women's art institutions during the campaign and in the inter-war era, Suffrage and the Arts is a timely and important collection which will contribute to a number of scholarly fields.

The Erotic Cloth

Author: Alice Kettle
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474281737
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Through their metaphorical and material qualities, textiles can be seductive, exciting, intimate and, at times, shocking and disquieting. This book is the first critical examination of the erotically charged relationship between the surface of the skin and the touch of cloth, exploring the ways in which textiles can seduce, conceal and reveal through their interactions with the body. From the beautiful cloth which is quietly suggestive, to bold expressions of deviant sexuality, cloth is a message carrier for both desiring and being desired. The drape, fold, touch and feel, the sound and look of cloth in motion, allow for the exploration of identity as a sensual, gendered or political experience. The book features contributions on the sensory rustle and drape of silk taffeta and the secret pleasures of embroidery, on fetishistic punk street-style and homoerotic intimacy in men's shirts on screen, and a new perspective on the role of cloth and skin in the classic film Blade Runner. In doing so, it interrogates experiences of cloth within social, historical, psychological and cultural contexts. Divided into four sections on representation, design, otherness and performance, The Erotic Cloth showcases a variety of debates that are at the heart of contemporary textile research, drawing on the fields of art, design, film, performance, culture and politics. Playful, provocative and beautifully illustrated with over 50 color images, it will appeal to students and scholars of textiles, fashion, gender, art and anthropology.

Fresh Lipstick

Author: Linda M. Scott
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 140397134X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
Challenges feminist beliefs that the fashion and beauty industry objectifies women, contending that elite women are out of touch with most women in the U.S. while arguing that fashion is more an expression of creativity and identity than a means of attracting men.