User:Aksellr/Thesis Outline Draft
02-10-2025
How to draft an outline?
What do you WANT to write about?
What is the text about? Explorations? HOW do you want to tell the story?
I want to write about knitting, women's labour, resisting capitalism, and maybe computing (?). Now how will I connect all of that? Probably through a critique of capitalism (it would only be fair). My list of topics and how they are connected so far goes like this:
knitting machines > grad project
traditionally feminine hobbies↓ > fiber arts > knitting > automatisation ↑↑ > hustle culture ↓↓
skilled labor > productive and reproductive work↑ > tradition and violence cycles. ↓↓
capitalism and time > leisure and hobbies
This text would to be very conversational, accessible, maybe even narrative. I'd like to have interviews with people (mostly flinta) to get their perspective on fiber arts in a feminist context. I can imagine using these interview to craft characters that you could follow along in the text while they are confronted to sexism and deprived of their leisure time. I would also love to make a form tracking how much time is dedicated to what kind of labour in women's everyday life, with a sample of people from a wide range of ages. I'm thinking of asking signal groups I'm part of for that. I will probably remove as many white cis het authors from my reading list as possible. I've read enough from them, I don't want them to pollute my research.
Outlining 3 key issues to explore
productive VS reproductive labour
- identifying causes in early socialisation, gender based stereotypes etc
- why do women do fiber based arts? why is it seem so feminine and men never dared to touch it except under exceptional circumstances? Woment would knit as part of the household chores/workload that came with being a stay at home wife –which is a full time unpaid job.
- leisure time
- entitlement to someone else's time
- "- Can you knit me a sweater? - No, but I can teach you how to make one!" For too long knitting and fiber arts in general have been deemed a grandma hobby, where grandma produce clothes for their children and grandchildren. Now, in a time where clothing is (mostly) easily accesible to anyone (regarding its quality), handknit items are a luxury. Breaking in the cost of a basic raglan sweater in a size M looks like: 60-80€ for yarn and 75h of work. Taking a dutch freelance rate of 50€/h, this makes it 3750€ + 60€ = 3810€ sweater, without taking into account the time to research the design, trial and error, possible frogging and remaking of some sections. So while I'm adamant that the time spent on knitting the sweater is well spent, I will not give you my time for free/no-low compensation. I knit because I enjoy the process, and the final outcome is not always what I expected, but I'm fine with it. Embracing imperfections. However, it would never occur to most people to walk into an accountant office and see that they enjoy what they're doing and ask them to do it for them for free (not sure about this argument lol). Knitting has been depicted as a selfless act of production perpetrated by women for generations so much so that people still feel entitled to their art. So no. It's MY. hobby, I'm doing it for MYSELF.
fiber arts
- skilled VS unskilled labor : How women's work has mostly been under represented in collective imagination. Women not being granted education made for cheap "unskilled" workers in numerous fields, making them replaceable, when in fact, they were highly trained through a hands-on approach or through patterns of social repetition. Think of "natural dexterity sue to small hands", perfectly fitted for detailed work, when in fact, it comes from having been trained since birth to be careful, mend socks, sew buttons and tidy after yourself.
- References
- see Silvia Federicci's work
- 1+0, sadie plant
- natural ennemies of books
- References
- craft VS art/skill
- arts and crafts movements, fluxus, Politics of Craft
- social reproduction
knitting to protest
- against fast trend cycles
- trendification of knitting
- as an art
- as a social phenomenon
- but also as a place to reclaim a spot in the public space
- mass pattern producers
- stashing is still overconsumption
- trendification of knitting
- re-color the world
- References:
- selfish process of knitting
- critique of hustle culture
In relation to the grad project?
collecting data through interviews and forms
analysing and knitting the data to visualise it in a defined given context
using knitting as a data visualisation process/device
using (old) knitting machines to do so?