Do-It-Yourself: The Precarious Work and Postfeminist Politics
of Handmaking (in) Detroit
Nicole Dawkins
Utopian Studies, Volume 22, Number 2, 2011, pp. 261-284 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
For additional information about this article
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Do-It-Yourself: The Precarious Work and Postfeminist
Politics of Handmaking (in) Detroit
Nicole Dawkins
abstract
Drawing on limited ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2009 and 2010, this ­article
analyzes how the idioms of “craft” and “handmaking” are being evoked and (re)
imagined in Detroit. Because of a recent flurry of journalistic accounts of ­artists,
makers, and entrepreneurs flocking to the city’s industrial ruins, Detroit has
reemerged in the public imaginary as a utopic “blank canvas”: an empty space
waiting to be inscribed and transformed by the arrival of a new (and predominately white) creative class. In this narrative of transforming the “Motor City” into
“Maker City,” the future of the not-quite-postindustrial city rests in the hands of
those willing and able to do-it-themselves. While urban farming, artist collectives,
hackerspaces, and business start-ups are all part of this narrative, here I focus primarily on the gendered domestic arts (knitting, sewing, needlepoint, and so on),
craft fairs, and in particular the work of an all-female grassroots collective of makers called Handmade Detroit. Interrogating the intersections between postfeminist
and post-Fordist subjectivities that emerge in and through the narratives, spaces,
and practices of the “indie” crafting community in Detroit, I argue that pleasure and self-fulfillment are often exchanged for what might otherwise be felt to be
Utopian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2011
Copyright © 2011. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
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unstable, precarious, and even exploitive work. Finally, this article explores how the
­transformative rhetoric of DIY often espouses values of pleasure, autonomy, and
(consumer) choice, reproducing neoliberalist rationalities and limiting the political
potential of craft and community activism in Detroit.
Over the last decade an informal and loosely knit network of persons,
­discourses, events, practices, and real and virtual spaces has emerged in
North American cities around the terms crafting, making, do-it-yourself, and
handmade. Drawing on three weeks of ethnographic fieldwork, semistructured interviews, and an online questionnaire conducted between November
2009 and August 2010, this article critically engages with how the idiom
of ­“handmaking” is being evoked and reimagined in the city of Detroit.1
Because of a recent flurry of journalistic accounts of artists, makers, and
entrepreneurs flocking to the city’s industrial ruins, Detroit has reemerged in
the public imaginary as a utopic “blank canvas”: an empty space waiting to be
inscribed and transformed by the arrival of a new (and predominately white)
creative class. In this narrative of transforming “The Motor City to Maker
City,” as the motto of the 2010 Maker Faire Detroit would have it, the future
of the not-quite-­postindustrial city rests in the hands of those willing and able
to do-it-themselves.
While urban farming, artist collectives, hackerspaces, and business
start-ups are all part of this narrative, here I focus primarily on the gendered
domestic arts (knitting, sewing, needlepoint, and so on), craft fairs, and in
particular the work of an all-female grassroots collective of makers called
Handmade Detroit.2 Involved in organizing “indie” craft fairs (including the
annual Detroit Urban Craft Fair), clothing, fabric, and houseware swaps and
building online resources for the local craft community, its members are
attempting to create new forms of urban sociality and “reclaim” the streets
of Detroit. The Handmade Detroit manifesto posted on the group’s Web
site reads in part: “We believe in the unique value of handmade goods, the
act of creation and good old community building. We believe that anyone
in Detroit who hems a pair of pants, knits a gift for a friend or sells their
handmade goods is helping to redefine sustainability, consumerism and the
future of our city.” Going back to the Arts and Crafts movement of the late
nineteenth century, crafts and craftsmanship have a long history of being
positioned as a moral corrective to alienating forms of industrial production.3
While it is true that the moral value of handmade goods is still articulated
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in ­opposition to “sweatshop” or “machine-made” goods, what is interesting
about the ­discourse of handmade that has emerged in the last decade is its
assertion not of particular artisanal qualities or labor concerns but of the
pleasures and the transformative value of making things yourself. What is
important to Handmade Detroit is not necessarily what is made, how skillfully it is produced, or even whether it is transacted through gift or economy
but, rather, this “unique” connection between individual acts of creation
and the transformation of self, city, and social world. In this context, making material things (and somehow exchanging these things with others) is
positioned as an inherently moral and meaningful practice. It is the uncritical celebration of craft-making as the means and ends of socioeconomic
transformation that this article attempts to confront. Is the imagined DIY
Detroit really a city of new or unlimited social and political possibilities?
What does this “handmade” Detroit look like to those who are, intentionally
or not, excluded by the individualist rhetoric and self-selected community of
doing-it-yourself ?
The discourses and practices that surround contemporary “craftwork”
are characterized by a desire for tactile and material production; this desire
seems to speak against the qualities of immaterial labor that scholars argue
have come to define the late capitalist era known as post-Fordism.4 However,
the process of making and selling crafts that appear at events like the Maker
Faire or the Detroit Urban Craft Fair informs and is informed by these postFordist subjectivities—as a form of highly individualized, flexible, affective
work that blurs the boundaries of leisure and labor time. The desire for pleasurable, creative work—exchanged for what might otherwise be felt to be
unstable, precarious, and even exploitive work—provides an interesting vantage point to explore the parallels and interpenetrations of post-Fordist labor
and postfeminist politics. As the core values of the postfeminist ­subjectivity—
pleasure, autonomy, (consumer) choice—are also central to neoliberalist
rationalities, I am interested in how these desires come to shape and bracket
the “politics of the possible” in Detroit.5 In this context, rather than a utopic
source for radical social and political potential, doing-it-yourself may in fact
serve the interests of post-Fordist capitalism and reinforce the city’s deeprooted structural inequalities. Overall, I want to open up critically engaged
spaces for interrogating the conflicting meanings of contemporary craftwork, both as a form of labor and as the basis for community building and
social activism more broadly.
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Utopian Studies 22.2
Contemporary Craft: Affective Work and the Structure of Feeling
The significance of handmaking in Detroit needs to be situated first within
the wider “crafter” or “indie craft” culture that has emerged online and off
since the late nineties. The dominant narrative put forth by popular accounts
such as Faythe Levine and Courtney Heirmerl’s Handmade Nation: The Rise
of D.I.Y., Art, Craft, and Design positions this resurgence as a reinstatement of
particular (often gendered) forms of public sociality around craft practice and
of the creation of alternative forms of consumption and material production
outside of corporate capitalism. It shares its ideological roots with a long
­history of arts and crafts movements, drawing on figures such as John Ruskin
and William Morris, “who contrasted the ‘spiritual deadness’ of machinemade goods with the craftsmanship of the Middle Ages, where goods may
have been imperfect but where their makers were not reduced to ‘slavery,’”
and the resurgence of craft that became associated with the anti–Vietnam
War pacifist movement.6 Rather than conceptualizing this diffuse network of
craftwork as a social movement, however, I propose that it is more fruitful to
consider it as a structure of feeling “which is indeed social and material, but
each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined
exchange.”7 Furthermore, drawing from the work of autonomist Marxists
Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Paulo Virno, this article is interested in
craft-making not simply as a site of political or social critique but also as a
kind of work, a form of post-Fordist labor/leisure.
While there is yet to be any extensive ethnographic research done on
the contemporary craft resurgence, a number of interdisciplinary scholars
have laid the groundwork for the study of crafting. Scholars in sociology,
material culture studies, and art history who have looked at contemporary
urban crafting in North America and Western Europe have focused particularly on the resurgent popularity in knitting. In their article on Stitch ’n
Bitch ­communities—groups of predominately female knitters who commune together to chat and knit in bars, coffee shops, and yarn stores—Stella
Minahan and Julie Cox describe the knitting resurgence in North America
as a form of resistance to what they term the “individualism of the present”
and to the marginalization of handicrafts as meaningful cultural projection.8
My research departs from that of Minahan and Cox in that it focuses primarily on crafters who sell the things they make, rather than knitting purely
for leisure. As I will develop later on, I also found that rather than resisting
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“individualism,” the handmade objects sold at Detroit craft fairs were deeply
encoded and explicitly branded with the individuality of the maker. While
I would agree with what they present as an ambivalent relationship between
crafters and feminine domesticity, Minahan and Cox overlook how crafting might also provide insight into the ambivalent politics of postfeminism
more broadly. Perhaps most relevant to my argument here, communication
scholars Zach Bratich and Heidi Brush have made a distinction between
“craftwork”—the specific laboring practices of making crafts—and “fabriculture”—the broader discourse, community, and “craftivism” connected to
the material labor of craft.9 Like Minahan and Cox, Bratich and Brush focus
on how contemporary fabriculture is a highly mediated phenomenon, connected not simply through face-to-face interactions but through print media,
television, blogs, and social networking sites. Drawing on Sadie Plant’s and
Kirsty Robertson’s respective engagements with links between crafting and
the origins of digital culture, Bratich and Brush suggest that virtual fabriculture reveals the always embodied and tactile nature of digital media and
labor.10 Most notably, they also position craft as a kind of affective labor,
which, as Michael Hardt defines it, is labor that is constitutive of communities
and collective subjectivities.11 My discussion of subjectivity throughout this
article draws upon anthropological approaches to the individual, collective,
and political subject; contingent, multiple, and constantly in flux, subjectivity is constituted by and through emergent affective states, embodied experience, institutional processes, and symbolic or cultural forms.12 Building on
the work of Bratich and Brush, this article aims to look at what the affective
labor of craft reveals about post-Fordist political and labor subjectivities more
broadly and how this connects to postfeminist individualist politics and to the
utopic imaginings of a “handmade” Detroit.
The Blank Canvas: Whiteness and the Utopic Potential of
Ruined Spaces
A byline in the Globe and Mail from February 26, 2010, by Siri Agrell reads,
“Artists, attracted by cheap property and the blank canvas of abandoned buildings, are moving in to the dying city. They just might be its saviours.” Clearly,
an overview of how the landscape of Detroit has been shaped by Fordist
production, race riots, “white flight” and suburbanization, disinvestment,
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traumatic deindustrialization, and processes of gentrification is far beyond
the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that according to popular accounts
America’s great industrial city has in the last fifty years been transformed into
“a scene of devastation and disintegration . . . which looks at times like a cross
between postwar Berlin and the ruin of an ancient civilization.”13 According
to sociologist George Steinmetz, there are as many as eighty thousand abandoned buildings in the city, and with empty lots outnumbering houses in
many neighborhoods, Detroit is increasingly referred to as an “urban prairie.”14 Since 2001, Detroit has had the highest unemployment rate among the
fifty largest American cities and since 2007, the highest rate of home foreclosures in the country.15
There has been a recent flurry of journalistic accounts of Detroit’s
“irresistible decay”—its industrial ruins and abandoned houses standing in
as evocative symbols of the economic downturn and the crisis of foreclosures in the United States. Geographer Tim Edensor argues that industrial
ruins are most often idealized through either a “romantic aesthetic,” which
emphasizes the picturesque, the sublime, and the evocation of melancholia,
or a “modern gothic sensibility,” which emerges out of postindustrial nostalgia and emphasizes dystopian fantasies of urban futures.16 There seem to be
traces of both of these gazes in the popular desire, or ruininlust, for Detroit’s
urban decay.17 These popular discourses evoke the ruin as a liminal space
caught between presence and absence, visible and invisible, preservation and
loss.18 Detroit’s industrial ruins do not simply encode the loss of the past but
also hold the promise of alternative futures; they are imagined as transgressive, heterotopic spaces that enable less-regulated forms of social practice—
spaces of graffiti, site-specific art, rave parties, drug use, sex, communal living,
and so on—that challenge commodified, planned urban space.19
The popular discourse of Detroit’s ruination represents the city as a dystopic wasteland but also as a kind of utopic “blank canvas”: an empty space
waiting to be inscribed and transformed by artists and the arrival of a new
creative class.20 According to Andrew Wagner, the editor in chief of the DIY
magazine Readymade, Detroit “presents an immense and almost limitless
amount of possibilities for anyone with the drive to make something happen.”21 In a recent New York Times article, Dale Dougherty, the editor and
publisher of Make magazine, says of Detroit: “There’s a sense that it’s a frontier again, that it’s open, that you can do things without a lot of people telling you, ‘No, you can’t do that.’”22 Like a frontier, Detroit is imagined to be
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dangerous and lawless but also ripe with the freedom and potential for doing
what you want to do, however you want to do it. In these accounts it is ­artists
and creative ­makers who are taking up the call to recolonize this cultural
“no-man’s-land”;23 positioned as Detroit’s “saviors” by journalists like Agrell,
they are uncritically celebrated as a force of almost evangelical transformation.24
However, as critics of Richard Florida’s equally zealous model of the
transformative potential of the “creative class” have argued, these narratives “work quietly with the grain of extant ‘neoliberal’ development agendas, framed around interurban competition, gentrification, middle-class
consumption and place-marketing.”25 More simply, accounts of Detroit as
a “blank canvas” are quick to ignore the fact that the city is still home to
almost a million people and a wide spectrum of hopes and desires for a more
­“livable” city. As a commenter on the recent New York Times article “Wringing
Art Out of the Rubble in Detroit” so aptly put it: “While Detroit is indeed
full of exciting opportunities for those (especially Caucasians) whose youth,
health, optimism and resources render them fit to survive in a complex and
embattled city, it is not a blank slate. History (it would be more correct to
say plural histories) is a ghost presence on every block. Detroit’s landscape
is a fascinating fabric of industrialization and its dissolution, labor struggles,
African American oppression, emergence and economic marginalization.”26
Far from a tabula rasa, the industrial and residential “ruins” of Detroit encode
histories and material traces of those who have lived and continue to live in
and among them.
The metaphor of the blank canvas is also notable for its “whiteness”;
as New York Times journalist Melena Ryzik mentions with little elaboration,
Detroit’s “largely white creative class stands out in a largely black city[, and]
integration remains rare.”27 This lack of integration was certainly apparent at
the Detroit Urban Craft Fair and the Detroit Maker Faire, where visible minorities—a misnomer in downtown Detroit, where African Americans are the
majority—were few and far between. Twenty-three out of fifty-five respondents to my online questionnaire felt that the growing craft community in
Detroit was predominately white—notably, 91 percent of respondents also selfidentified as “white” or “Caucasian.” When asked to explain the lack of diversity in the craft community, a few responders noted that there was a certain
kind of luxury implicit in having the time, resources, and social capital needed
not only to make things but to produce a particular aesthetic or marketable
product: “Oh yes, its white kids who have the luxury of DIY. Most of the Black
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community has been DIY out of necessity for years here. Drinking out of a
jelly jar because you don’t have dishes is poverty. Drinking out of a jelly jar
with a cute decoupage picture of a robot because you are privileged enough
to differentiate between a store-bought branded set of dishes is DIY.”28 For this
respondent, the ability to choose and distinguish between making something
out of necessity and making as part of a larger aesthetic or moral calling was a
matter of (white) privilege and of cultural capital.
Craft organizers seem to be aware that there is something “vaguely”
problematic about the cultural and racial homogeneity of the craft movement. When I interviewed Handmade Detroit members and Detroit Urban
Craft Fair (DUCF) organizers Allison Davey, Chloe Vousden, and Sophie
Mitchell about the relative lack of diversity at the DUCF, they were surprised
that anyone would ascribe a kind of luxury to making and selling handmade
things.29 While she acknowledged that almost all of the vendors and the
majority of attendants at their events were white, Vousden said that all submissions, including those with, as she put it, “obvious ethnicity in them,”
were judged the same way and that “it wasn’t as if people [were] sending
in headshots with their work.” While she denied that the “ethnicity” of the
maker influenced their vendor selection process, clearly what she perceived
to be signifiers of ethnicity stood out among the seemingly racially unmarked
work of white crafters. When I was first introduced to Handmade Detroit
and the DUCF at the City of Craft show in Toronto in 2008, Davey told me
that although black crafters have applied to be in their show, “their aesthetic
doesn’t fit in” because “aesthetically, indie craft is very white.” Tautologically,
the lack of diversity at craft shows in Detroit was naturalized aesthetically:
“Indie” craft is “white” because it is not perceived to be “ethnically marked,”
and therefore “ethnically marked” crafts are out of place at “indie” craft fairs.
According to a Toronto-based craft organizer I interviewed: “I think it’s odd
when people submit work and they are of a nonwhite ethnicity, their work
tends to mirror their ethnicity somehow. It’s kind of weird to me—well not
weird that they would do that, but weird that that is a common thing.”30 Like
Vousden and Davey, she never questioned the essentialist reasoning that positions white crafters as individuals and racialized crafters as “representatives of
vaguely comprehended groups.”31
The craft techniques and objects associated with the online marketplace
Etsy.com, online craft forum Craftster.org, and Craft magazine do seem to
share a particular but hard-to-pin-down aesthetic that is often characterized
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by a sense of irony and irreverence that self-consciously subvert “traditional”
craft styles and forms.32 As the very term do-it-yourself implies, these products
privilege individualism and the assertion of creative authorship, which are
assumed to be at odds with craft practices that reference membership to a
particular cultural group. It is, however, problematic to suggest that indie
craft authentically articulates some sort of “white” tastes or experiences; as
anthropologist John Hartigan writes in his ethnographic account of poor
white neighborhoods in Detroit, whiteness (like any other imposed racial or
ethnic category) is “a fluid and malleable category, encompassing a relentlessly heterogeneous population.”33
When we spoke in February 2010, Davey seemed far more conflicted and
ambivalent about the lack of diversity at Handmade Detroit events:
We live in a very segregated place, we call ourselves “Handmade
Detroit,” and we’re all white. It’s strange to me. Why? I don’t really
know. It scares me that it is kind of an aesthetic movement. And
I don’t really like that. I want it to have a little more meaning, than
we all like the same Ikea-looking shit. We all like modern stuff, and
vintage stuff, and like, white-people aesthetic. And that’s why we’re
here. That feels so hollow, and I don’t feel hollow when I am doing
it. But I have no idea. I mean I wonder sometimes if it is a dominant
culture thing, you know, it’s not like African Americans don’t have
a rich tradition of making stuff, you know, but are they not doing
the same kind of organizing? And is that like a culture thing? Why is
that? I feel like it is more than just—I don’t even know how to put it
into words. I mean why did we feel that we needed to get together
and form a community? I don’t know. I have no answers at all.34
During our discussion the lack of integration in the Detroit craft community was naturalized as an outcome of living in a “segregated place” or
of the “indie” craft scene’s roots in the indie music scene and the blogging
community or as a result of black crafters “not doing the same kind of
organizing.” For Davey, the absence of racial diversity in the Detroit maker
community is not an effect of exclusionary practices but is subsumed within
essentialist aesthetic difference. Rather than being direct articulations of
racial sentiments, the hegemony of whiteness in the Detroit craft community stands as an example of “the slew of categorical perceptions, discursive
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objectifications, and cultural assessments of belonging and difference that
shape all ­projections of ‘community.’”35 While these kinds of essentialist
­logics underlie all communities and social movements, the wider craft community included, they are no less insidious; the seemingly inclusive and
altruistic rhetoric of transforming the city of Detroit through local, creative
production is bracketed by the neglect of or indifference for those who fall
outside of these aesthetic and racially coded boundaries.
Precarious Craftwork: Post-Fordism and the Immaterial Labor
of Handmaking
On July 31, 2010, the world’s largest DIY festival, the Maker Faire, took place
for the first time in Metro Detroit on the grounds of the Henry Ford Museum
in Dearborn. Despite the intense heat and humidity, six women sat knitting
up rectangles of bright multicolored yarn to be joined to make an “unsanctioned” scarf for the statue of Thomas Edison that stands at the Greenville
Village on the Henry Ford grounds. A black Ford Model T drove around
the Faire grounds alongside multiperson pedal-powered vehicles made of
reclaimed and recycled automotive parts. A man wearing a massive papiermâché head resembling Henry Ford was taught to solder circuit boards by a
man with thinning rainbow-colored hair. I went to the Maker Faire expecting
the homemade multiperson bicycles, the hacked instruments, and the handsewn reconstructed clothing to stand in marked contrast to the Henry Ford
Museum’s collection dedicated to the city’s illustrious history of industrial
production. However, the Faire organizers and the host institution seemed to
be constructing a very different kind of narrative.
In a July 2010 blog post entitled “Making Detroit: Changing the Story”
on the Make: Online Blog, Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make
­magazine, argues that the story of Detroit needs to be changed from that of
“a disaster more than 50 years in the making” to “a story about what people
are doing and what they can do”—a story of transforming the “Motor City”
into “Maker City.” In the post, he recounts his decision to hold the event
at the Henry Ford Museum: “Walking amongst the steam engines, automobiles, planes, and bicycles, I saw it as the ultimate maker destination.
Designed by Ford himself, he wanted others to learn and experience what
previous ­generations had made—these marvellous machines. As I enjoy
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reading history, I was fascinated by the long history that was spawned by
the tinkering in ­Henry Ford’s garage. I thought The Henry Ford would be a
perfect place to host a Maker Faire, and allow us to connect what’s happening today with a past that shows us what’s possible.”36 Likewise, in a Detroit
Free Press article on the Maker Faire, Tom Varitek, senior manager of program operations for the Henry Ford Museum, claims, “Having the Maker
Faire here, with our long manufacturing tradition, it really brings this story
full circle.”37 Rather than antithesis, the characteristically ­noncorporate,
socially and environmentally conscious forms of making that would seem
to define the “Maker City”—including raising your own chickens and bees,
handcrafting housewares out of found material, and founding local “hacker­
spaces”—are presented as a direct legacy of Fordist industrial production;
doing-it-­yourself, by this account, is something that Detroiters have “in
their DNA.”38 While figures like Dougherty attempt to draw the values of
small-scale makers back to Henry Ford “tinkering in his garage,” the actual
practices of ­“making”—factory labor—that went into industrial auto production are entirely glossed over. There would seem to be little similarity
between the deskilled, standardized labor on the Ford assembly line and the
“making” involved in designing, finding materials for, and building a single
one-of-a-kind vehicle from start to finish in your own backyard. Rather than
articulating a kind of residual culture rooted in either Fordist manufacturing or pre-Fordist (small-scale and home-based) craft production, contemporary forms of making in Detroit reflect the subjective qualities and values
of post-Fordism as individualized, creative, flexible (and unstable) work that
shifts between labor and leisure.39
Post-Fordism is the “new age” of capitalism that has emerged since the
mid-1970s, characterized by deindustrialization, the proliferation of flexible
decentralized labor and production, a feminization of the work force, increasing emphasis on consumer choice based on lifestyle rather than social class,
the “aestheticization of commodities,” and the “commodification of aesthetics.”40 The transition from Fordism to post-Fordism has been marked by the
passage from the production of mass-produced material goods to the production of nonmaterial goods and services and similarly, from material to immaterial or affective forms of labor.41 Thus, whereas the male factory worker
stood as the exemplary worker of the Fordist system, Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri argue that this role has been displaced by the ­figure of immaterial labor “involved in communication, cooperation, and the production
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and reproduction of affects.”42 Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt ­utilize the term
­precariat to describe this new labor power as “both an experience of ­exploitation
and a (potential) new political subjectivity.”43 Similarly, I am interested in the
labor of craft-making not simply as a mode of economic production but also
as the production of particular political and social subjectivities.44
A number of the forty-some crafters with whom I spoke with ­informally
at Detroit-area craft fairs mentioned that they also worked full- or part-time as
bartenders, nannies, or even “social-media coordinators” at ad ­companies—
jobs that seem to typify what Paulo Virno describes as post-Fordist “linguistic-virtuosic” labor.45 In contrast to their other work, crafters seem to desire
the bodily and material labor involved in, for example, spinning raw wool
into yarn or knitting yarn into mittens. Sabrina Gschwandtner, the creator
of the “new-wave” knitting zine KnitKnit, has argued that the knitting resurgence reveals that despite our dependence on the Internet, “we are still
­sensual beings” who desire “a tactile relationship to the world.”46 Likewise, as
a forty-eight-year-old maker of sculptural beads from suburban Detroit put it
in her questionnaire response, making things by hand is important “because
it provides a link to the past and keeps us human in these technologically
suffocating times.”47 While for some crafters this desire for tactile and material making defines their leisure activities outside of work, the vendors at the
Detroit Urban Craft Fair, for example, position their making as “work” that
subsidizes their income. Many hope to eventually make things—and blog
about making things—full-time.48
While the vendors at the Detroit Urban Craft Fair expend material labor
to produce the things they sell, their work is equally, if not more, dependent
on the immaterial work of self-branding, marketing, and making and maintaining relationships in the craft community both online and off. To echo
anthropologist Sasha David’s work on the Hollywood talent industry, crafters
sell their selves, their politics, and their interests in order to sell their crafts.49
At the DUCF, the crafters’ goods are set up in front of them on a four-footlong table along with business cards, signage, and other promotional material; it is almost impossible to interact with the “goods” without in some
ways interacting with the vendor who made them. As one questionnaire
respondent (a thirty-two-year-old from suburban Michigan who purchased
handmade goods but did not self-identify as a craft maker) put it: “Handmade
things are more interesting, because they absorb some of the personality of
the person making them.” The self-branding and personalization of these
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crafted objects echo the myth of the singular artist, where the ­particularities
and uniqueness of each piece are linked to the biographical history of the artist.50 The selling of goods at the DUCF, likewise, would often involve recounting stories of why the maker had first produced these objects and how these
objects were in one way or another indivisible from the maker’s unique experiences, interests, and social relationships. One woman, for example, sold
handmade soap in the shape of grenades, she said, because her husband was
a World War II ­reenactor/industrial designer who had made the molds for
“battle” props. Another woman began selling “allergy awareness” buttons
and T-shirts because her four-year-old grandson had severe peanut allergies.
Vendors sold stationery, buttons, and silk-screened T-shirts that referenced
their favorite bands, dialogue from cult films, or abandoned industrial landmarks of Detroit. In this context, shopping and vending at the craft fair constitute an intersubjective performance where vendors and shoppers alike are
able to enact and assert their unique individualism through the exchange of
crafted objects.
The process of bringing the domestic activity of knitting or sewing into
the marketplace of a craft sale collapses the binary of labor time and nonlabor time; what crafters do for nonremunerated “leisure” is often the very
same thing that they do to produce and sell items for profit. This reflects
post-Fordist labor power more broadly, where “it is increasingly difficult to
maintain the fiction of any measure of the working day and thus separate
the time of production from the time of reproduction, or work time from
leisure time.”51 The labor that goes into craft fairs and the online handmade
marketplace of Etsy.com resonates with that of user-created virtual worlds
like Second Life.52 Anthropologist Tom Boellstorff describes the labor that
goes into creating the emergent virtual world of Second Life as a kind of
“creationist capitalism,” where—like craftwork—labor and production are
conceived in terms of creativity, so that leisure and self-fulfillment become
both the means and the product of this labor.53 While the vast majority of
crafters, like their Second Life counterparts, are unable to make a living
wage—or often even subsidize the costs of their materials—at craft shows
or by selling their wares online, it is not experienced as a form of Marxist
“superexploitation.”54
It is this logic of self-fulfilling labor that enables the Handmade Detroit
organizers to work, as Vousden put it, “week in, week out, month in, month
out,” upward of thirty hours a week organizing craft events and doing
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promotion without compensation, in addition to their own craft-making.
Handmade Detroit organizers Mitchell and Vousden took up bartending to
subsidize their lives as craft makers and organizers after quitting or being laid
off from more stable work. This kind of DIY craftwork shares a lot of the
qualities of post-Fordist cultural work: “long hours and bulimic patterns of
working; the collapse or erasure of the boundaries between work and play;
poor pay; high levels of mobility; passionate attachment to the work and to
the identity of creative laborer; an attitudinal mindset that is a blend of bohemianism and entrepreneurialism.”55 This “passionate attachment” to the love
of work, if cheap and unstable, creates a precarious labor pool for whom
“social security [is] exchanged for so-called freedom.”56 Gill and Pratt argue
that much of the optimism about immaterial and creative work focuses on
the positive and affirmative affects of desire, sociality, pleasure, and fulfillment
rather than nonaffirmative feelings that also accompany this kind of labor:
fatigue, exhaustion, frustration, anxiety, and the “individualized shame” from
having the self completely bound up with one’s work.57 Mitchell, Vousden,
and Davey all spoke of the anxieties they felt when not being “productive”
even in their so-called free time; as Vousden said, “Those flop-around days
are such torture.” They also all referred to the intense “burnout” they experienced, particularly after the holiday season craft fairs. If this kind of creative and flexible labor is in fact what is demanded of contemporary forms of
capitalism, how are we to know when these subjective states and desires resist
capital—either as a form of critical craftivist engagement or as part of the
elementary and spontaneous communism that Hardt and Negri envision—
rather than bind us to it at every level of our lives and being?58
Crafting Postfeminism: Craft, Femininity, and Neoliberal
Rationalities
Tucked into the southwest corner of the grounds, the “Craft” area of the
Detroit Maker Faire stood in contrast to the masculinized spaces of robotics
demos, hacked Power Wheel drag races, and the “Army Technology Zone”
nearby.59 With few exceptions the craft sale vendors, as well as the instructors and participants in the knitting, felting, and needlework demos, were
women. In the Handmade Detroit craft tent, Lindsey Dolman’s booth was
set up under a gold hand-appliquéd sign. To her right was a display of about
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a dozen handmade aprons—each one-of-a-kind, they were made from bright
vintage floral fabric and contrasting trim. To her left, tiny shrink plastic
depictions of the state of Michigan were hand-stitched onto floral fabric in
wooden embroidery hoops. At the front of the booth were three decorative
“buntings” made of vintage fabric and lace doilies. Like the dainty pink
crocheted cupcakes and hand-stitched kitchen towels being sold at neighboring tables, Dolman’s crafts appeared to encode a domestic femininity.
The discourse surrounding the craft resurgence has emphasized the creation of new forms of public sociality through bringing traditionally domestic handicrafts into casual “third spaces” (like bars and cafés, as well as craft
fairs) quite unlike the professional and hierarchical spaces of craft guilds.60
Discursively, this process of bringing traditionally devalued “women’s work”
into the masculine “economic” realm has been positioned as a third-wave
feminist endeavor.61 Like the alternative monetary systems that anthropologist Bill Maurer writes about, the articulation of alternativeness in DIY discourse is tied to a “conjuring of the past,” a nostalgia and melancholy for
a “past that never was,” before the division of economy and society and in
the case of craft, before the abjection of the domestic and domestication.62
Rather than situating contemporary articulations of craft-making as either
a third-wave or postfeminist project—the latter often condemned third-wave
feminists for being apolitical, lacking an organized politics, and producing
“a retrogressive and reactionary conservatism”—I would argue that it is
betwixt and between, ambivalently encoding both explicitly feminist politics and conservative feminine desires.63 For this reason, craft appears to be a
revealing standpoint from which to explore “the ever-changing plurality of
positions and issues that constitute feminisms today.”64
In her introduction to Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec, Jean Railla writes about
how her second-wave feminist professors at the University of California, Los
Angeles, had reasoned “that housework and the domestic arts were drudgery
work done by women who don’t know better. Smart, enlightened women
became writers, thinkers; they became important, like men. They didn’t
have time for silly things like cooking, sewing, knitting or cleaning.”65 Bratich
and Brush situate contemporary fabriculture within what they call the “new
domesticity”; neither rejection nor reclamation, the new domesticity “does
not transform old into new, it reweaves the old itself. . . . [It] is an affirmation
of something that is no longer what we thought it was,” specifically a symbol
of female subordination and of devalued labor.66 This revaluation of practices
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of feminine domesticity reflects a desire to mediate the abjection of the home
and homemaker through second-wave feminist discourse. However, this
desire for the prestige of the homemaker is often ambivalent, “parodied and
presented as melancholic; a simulacrum of a past that never was rather than
one to be re-created.”67 Dolman’s aprons, for example, seem kitschy and ironic
when posed next to her blue “Mustache Prize” ribbons—gag gifts intended
for those who have or admire facial hair.
Encoded in these kitschy vintage aprons, contemporary craftwork can
be seen as a site of “postfemininity”: a liminal space of pre- and postfeminist
desires and choices that can no longer be conceptualized as “a split between
feminism and housewifery, agency and victimization, work and family life.”68
Feminist scholar Stephanie Genz argues that postfemininity constitutes neither a radical break from “old-fashioned” philocentric femininity nor complete continuity but, rather, something much more ambiguous and hard to
pin down. It is informed by “the stereotypes of womanhood propagated by
a misogynistic, patriarchal culture but also a feminist ‘raised’ consciousness
and critique of these images, a postmodern awareness of gender deconstruction as well as a neoliberal belief in the autonomous individual.”69 As Genz
argues, postfeminism and postfemininity emerging since the nineties privilege individualistic assertions of choice and self-rule, primarily constructed
through consumption, rather than the collective, activist struggle that
informed second-wave feminism.70 Following Rosalind Gilk, rather than an
epistemological position or historical shift, it seems more fruitful to situate
postfeminism and postfemininity in terms of sensibilities or subjectivities;71
at the core of this sensibility are “notions of choice, of ‘being oneself ’ and
‘pleasing oneself.’”72
The postfeminist desires for pleasure and self-improvement seem to justify the low-paying precarious work that goes into selling handmade goods as
well as cultural work more broadly.73 In a 2009 article from an online women’s
lifestyle magazine, Double X, Sarah Mosle argues that Etsy.com (the online
marketplace of handmade goods) “peddles a false feminist fantasy” to the
women who make up 96 percent of its sellers. According to Mosle, “What
Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise
that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and
remunerative career”; this promise, she argues, is an untenable fantasy.74
A 2009 New York Times article entitled “That Hobby Looks Like a Lot of Work”
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reveals that the most successful Etsy sellers, some of whom have made over
$100,000 a year, are only able to do so by working upward of sixteen hours a
day and by paying themselves far less than minimum wage for their labor.75
Writing about the precarity of cultural or creative work, Gill and Pratt argue
that affective desires for pleasure and self-fulfillment generate consent for
working lives that “without this emotional and symbolic sheen, might appear
arduous, tiring and exploitative.”76 It is surprising, then, that no ethnographic
and little theoretical work has been done to engage the individualist politics
of postfeminism and the ways in which the desire for pleasurable, creative
work might produce forms of self-exploitation and precarious labor that best
serve the interest of post-Fordist capitalism.77
The core values of “autonomy, choice and self-improvement” encoded
in the very language of “Do-It-Yourself ” speak not only to a postfeminist subjectivity but to the central values of neoliberalism.78 As David Harvey defines
it, “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that propose that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating
individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free
trade.”79 In this framework “each individual is held responsible and accountable for his or her own actions and well-being,” and “individual success or
failure is interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings . . . rather than being attributed to any systemic property.”80 The rhetoric
and political possibilities of making in Detroit, and of contemporary urban
activism more broadly, are shaped by this neoliberal rationality. Sociologist
Julie Guthman, for example, has revealed how contemporary food activism
in California intersects with neoliberal rationalities through the celebration
of consumer choice, localism, entrepreneurialism, and self-improvement—
all themes that resonate deeply with the politics of DIY.81 The discourse of
DIY, like that of food politics, has “contributed to neoliberal subjects ruled
not through society but through regulated choices and aspirations to selfactualization and fulfillment.”82
The connection between this neoliberal logic of doing-it-yourself and
postfeminist politics in Detroit was articulated clearly by Handmade Detroit
member Allison Davey:
I am looking forward to being a postfeminist [laughs]. I mean I don’t
really practice, like, feminism. But . . . I was really like an activist
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before, but feeling like that is really lonely, you know, in a way. Like
you have to feel superior, like feel like you know the right way. Have
all of these missions that you like put yourself on. I got really sick of
that. Like, really sick of that . . . that liberal superiority crap. And I do
think of craft as like a movement for me, and I do kind of think of it
as activism. But in a way it’s different. It’s much more personal, and
it’s much more about creating the life you want. Like, I live in the
suburbs, and I don’t really have a community. . . . [H]ow am I going to
create that? And like how am I going to help people that I care about?
So it’s not really about femininity and all that stuff, but I feel like
that is a part of me. So this is like low-level feminist politics. I was a
­women’s studies minor, in college, and I just got really sick of women
[laughs]. And like playing the victim and like . . . nobody needs to be
that angry. I may not be able to change the world, but I can make my
life better, and that might be really selfish, but I don’t care.83
Here there are elements of what some critics of postfeminism have
described as a backlash against (second-wave) feminism—a frustration or
exhaustion with “being angry” and “playing the victim.”84 More significantly,
while she does position “craft” as a kind of activism, rather than aimed at collective social change, Davey’s “low-level feminist politics” is focused at crafting a better self and more pleasurable life for the individual. Similarly, when
asked how political or ethical values informed the things she made, a fortyyear-old questionnaire respondent stated that her crafts “are mostly utilitarian, or an expression of some color or form I love. Very rarely does politics
come into play. Even though I grow veggies, it’s mostly for my own pleasure.
Although, I do totally support organic, local, anti-commercialized production, what I do, I do for me.”85 For this woman, the seemingly political aspects
to rejecting commercially produced foods and goods by doing-it-herself were
downplayed and even discounted; the things she made were not guided by an
explicit political consciousness or some kind of solidarity for greater societal
change but, rather, for individualized pleasure and personal satisfaction.
In a Make: Online Blog post from July 29, 2010, entitled “Detroit Is the
Freedom to Make Things,” Detroit clothing designer Bethany Shorb places
the future of the city entirely within the hands of local entrepreneurs:
“Detroit does not need a ‘savior’—whether it be a casino, government entity,
or another massive corporation to take over and dole out short-lived handouts.
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Detroit will re-invent itself and prosper through the help of ­makers, thinkers,
and entrepreneurs who thrive while operating on a lean budget, without the
bloat that has caused the demise of many of our once-venerated large corporations.”86 While espousing an anticorporate view, Shorb locates the solution
to the city’s social problems entirely within the mechanism of the creative
market. Just as in food activism, this entrepreneurism has the (unintended)
effect of depoliticizing the structural socioeconomic problems in the city
by rendering them as individual responsibility.87 Bracketed by and through
individualistic desires for pleasure, (consumer) choice, and autonomy, this
imagined “handmade” city is not a radical site of new or unlimited social
and political possibilities—particularly for the individuals and communities
excluded or marginalized by these discourses—but, rather, stands to replicate
the neoliberal values and serve the interests of post-Fordist capital, which it
seems at first to confront.
Conclusion: Crafting a Politics of the Possible
Informed by fieldwork conducted at the Detroit Urban Craft Faire and
the first Maker Faire Detroit, I have situated craftwork, making, and do-it-­
yourself within the wider discourse of Detroit as a utopic blank canvas or
urban frontier waiting to be colonized by an emergent creative class. As
this venerated creative class is predominately white and middle class, the
discourse of recrafting Detroit subsumes exclusionary racial politics in aesthetic concerns, bringing into question its potential as a site for and means to
wider social and political change. I described how contemporary craftwork
produces post-Fordist labor subjectivities through the blurring of labor and
leisure. As my research has focused on the feminized and “domestic” forms
of making, “crafting,” sewing, needlepoint, knitting, and so on, I have argued
that the structure of feeling surrounding crafting is encoded with postfeminist values of pleasure, autonomy, and self-improvement that serve to justify
what might otherwise be seen as exploitative, precarious work. These values,
particularly as the basis for social and political engagement in Detroit, can
be seen as replicating the rationalities of neoliberalism that serve to further
reinforce structural inequalities in the city. As a maker myself, it is not my
intention to discount or malign the values and desires of craft makers—in my
own life craftwork has provided a relaxing, pleasant, and meaningful respite
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from ­academia and service work. Rather, I have attempted to critically engage
how the underlying post-Fordist, postfeminist, and neoliberal values shape
the rhetoric of making and of the “politically possible” in Detroit.88 My hope
is that denaturalizing the neoliberal underpinnings of these discourses—and
questioning their exclusionary practices—might allow for the forging of more
inclusive communities and radical labor solidarities both within and beyond
the city of Detroit.
Notes
1. I conducted participant observation at the Detroit Urban Craft Faire, Detroit Maker
Faire, and Detroit-area stores that sold locally crafted goods for a total of three weeks
­between 2009 and 2010. In February 2010, I conducted semistructured interviews with
three of the five members of Handmade Detroit. In January 2010, I created an online
questionnaire called “Handmaking in Detroit,” which was circulated through online
networking sites and through the Handmade Detroit Web site; I received fifty-five
responses. The questionnaire contained twenty-three open-ended questions. In addition
to demographic information, the questions asked what respondents found meaningful
about making things, how they distinguished making from other kinds of work they do
or have done, whether they are inspired to “make” full-time, how they became aware of
a craft community in Detroit, what impact (if any) they felt the D.I.Y. community has
had in shaping the city of Detroit, and if they felt that the “handmade” culture in Detroit
was racially “white.” This fieldwork was made possible by a University of Toronto
­Department of Anthropology Research Grant.
2. For a discussion of how needlework has been implicated in and constitutive of
notions of femininity in the twentieth century, see Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch:
Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010). For a discussion
of gender and the contemporary knitting resurgence, see Alla Myzelev, “Whip Your
Hobby into Shape: Knitting, Feminism, and Construction of Gender,” Textile 7, no. 1
(2009): 148–63.
3. See Tom Crook, “Craft and the Dialogics of Modernity: The Arts and Crafts
Movement in Late-Victorian Edwardian England,” Journal of Modern Craft 2 (2009): 17–32.
4. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004).
5. Julie Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California,”
Geoforum 39 (2008): 1171–83.
6. Stella Minahan and Julie Wolfram Cox, “Stitch’nBitch: Cyberfeminism, a Third
Place, and the New Materiality,” Journal of Material Culture 12 (2007): 13.
7. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford, 1977), 131.
8. Minahan and Cox, “Stitch’nBitch.”
9. Jack Bratich and Heidi Brush, “Craftivity Narratives: Fabriculture, Affective Labor,
and the New Domesticity,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International
Communication Association, San Francisco, May 24, 2007.
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10. Ibid., 27; Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture
(­ London: Fourth Estate, 1997); Kirsty Robertson, “The Viral Knitting Project and
Writing on the Wool,” N.paradoxa (Activist Art) 23 (2009): 56–61. Plant suggests, in her
“machinist” account of Ada Lovelace (collaborator on the first analog computer),
that binary code has its origin in knit and purl stitches; Robertson has looked at how
­contemporary artists have taken up the connections between crafting and informatics.
11. Michael Hardt, “Affective Labor,” Boundary 2 26 (1999): 89–100.
12. See Joao Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, “Introduction: Rethinking
Subjectivity,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 1–23.
13. Bob Herbert, “An American Catastrophe,” New York Times, November 20, 2009.
14. George Steinmetz, “Detroit: A Tale of Two Crises,” Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space 27 (2009): 763.
15. Ibid., 766.
16. Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 14.
17. Rose Macauley, The Pleasure of Ruins (New York: Walker, 1967).
18. Michael Roth, Claire Lyons, and Charles Merewether, Irresistible Decay: Ruins
­Reclaimed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1997).
19. Edensor, Industrial Ruins.
20. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work,
­Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Perseus Book Group, 2002).
21. From “Friday Five,” Design Milk Blog, April 23, 2010, http://design-milk.com/
friday-five-with-andrew-wagner-of-readymade/.
22. Melena Ryzik, “Wringing Art Out of the Rubble in Detroit,” New York Times,
August 3, 2010, accessed January 13, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/arts/
design/04maker.html.
23. Yael Navaro-Yashin, “‘Life Is Dead Here’: Sensing the Political in ‘No Man’s Land,’”
Anthropological Theory 3 (2003): 107–25.
24. Grant Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in
Contemporary Community Art,” Afterimage 22, no. 6 (1995): 5–11.
25. Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban
and Regional Research 29 (2005): 740–71. See also P. Maliszewski, “Flexibility and Its
Discontents,” The Baffler 16 (2004): 69–79.
26. Rick Prelinger, August 4, 2010 (3:46 p.m.), comment on Ryzik, “Wringing Art Out of
the Rubble in Detroit.”
27. Ryzik, “Wringing Art Out of the Rubble in Detroit.”
28. Respondent self-identified as female, forty-eight, “white,” from suburban Detroit.
29. All names are pseudonyms.
30. This interview was conducted in February 2009 as part of an ethnographic study of
the Toronto crafter community. The craft fair organizers in Toronto whom I spoke with
expressed similar justifications for excluding what they saw as “ethnically” marked craft
applications from the events they curated. While Toronto is known as a m
­ ulticultural
city, attendees and vendors of the craft events I attended were, as in Detroit, almost
exclusively white.
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31. John Hartigan Jr., Odd Tribes: Toward a Cultural Analysis of White People (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005), 9.
32. The craft forum Craftster.org slogan, for example, is “No Tea Cosies Without
Irony.”
33. Hartigan, Odd Tribes, 7.
34. Allison Davey (Handmade Detroit member and Detroit Urban Craft Fair organizer),
in conversation with the author, February 2010.
35. Hartigan, Odd Tribes, 21.
36. Dale Dougherty, “Making Detroit: Changing the Story,” Make: Online Blog, July 22,
2010, http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/07/making-detroit.html.
37. B. J. Hammerstein, “Maker Faire Puts the Spotlight on Creativity,” Detroit Free Press,
July 29, 2010.
38. Ryzik, “Wringing Art Out of the Rubble in Detroit.”
39. Williams, Marxism and Literature.
40. Ash Amin, “Post-Fordism: Models, Fantasies, and Phantoms of Transition,” in
­Post-Fordism: A Reader, ed. Ash Amin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 31.
41. Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory, and
­Post-Fordism (Valiz, Amsterdam: Antennae, 2010), 18.
42. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000), 53.
43. Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labor,
Precariousness, and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture, and Society 25 (2008): 3.
44. Hardt and Negri, Empire, xvii.
45. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 58.
46. Sabrina Gschwandtner, “Sabrina Gschwandtner: KnitKnit,” in Handmade Nation: The
Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design, ed. Faythe Levine and Courtney Heimerl (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), 26.
47. Similarly, the Church of Craft was established in Los Angeles in 2000 around the
spiritual significance of making things by hand. According to the Reverend Callie Jannoff,
on the organization’s Web site, “Our consumption plagues our quiet lives, filling it with
broadcast noise and boxes of macaroni and cheese. But when we make something,
we are filled with satisfaction, the kind you feel to your core” (http://churchofcraft.
org/a-sermon-simple-and-captivating/).
48. Ironically, the materiality of handmaking is always in some way mediated by the virtual.
On November 20, 2009, the night before the Detroit Urban Craft Fair, Handmade Detroit
held a “tweet-up” for vendors to get together at a local bar and socialize. On the stage, they
had set up supplies so that attendees could make three-inch round buttons of their Twitter
aliases. In between fries, sliders, and pints of beer, everyone simultaneously tweeted via
their smart phones about what was going on. The next morning, one vendor (who was text
­messaging a friend vending at a Chicago craft fair) remarked that she knew it had been a
­successful morning at the DUCF because she hadn’t had time to “tweet” about it yet.
49. Sasha David, “Self for Sale: Notes on the Work of Hollywood Talent Managers,”
Anthropology of Work Review 28, no. 3 (2007): 6–16.
50. Gielen, Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude, 213.
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51. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 402–3.
52. Tom Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually
Human (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 213.
53. In the Second Life virtual world, users retain copyright and are able to sell the
virtual content they generate (clothes, hairstyles, furniture, etc.) for “real”-world profit.
However, in order to “own” land and have access to virtual materials (called “prims”)
residents must pay membership fees to the Linden Labs Corporation. Boellstorff, Coming
of Age in Second Life, 213.
54. Ibid.
55. Gill and Pratt, “In the Social Factory?” 14.
56. Gielen, Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude, 53.
57. Gill and Pratt, “In the Social Factory?” 16.
58. Ibid., 19–21.
59. The U.S. Army’s Research, Development, and Engineering Command was present
at the Maker Faire, displaying military vehicles, advances in energy-storage devices, and
robotics and conducting an interactive robotics competition for Maker Faire p­ articipants.
Like the corporate presence of Ford, the inclusion and celebration of military
­technology struck me as incongruent with the otherwise self-proclaimed environmental,
local, and anticorporate exhibitions.
60. Minahan and Cox, “Stitch’nBitch.”
61. See, for example, Myzelev, “Whip Your Hobby into Shape.”
62. Bill Maurer, Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 95.
63. Stephanie Genz, Postfeminities in Popular Culture (Houndmills, England: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009), 336.
64. Ann Braithwaite, “The Personal, the Political, Third-Wave, and Postfeminisms,”
Feminist Theory 3, no. 3 (2002): 342.
65. Jean Railla, Get Crafty: Hip Home Ec (New York: Broadway, 2004), 2.
66. Bratich and Brush, “Craftivity Narratives,” 8.
67. Minahan and Cox, “Stitch’nBitch,” 17.
68. Stacey Gillis and Joanne Hollows, eds., Feminism, Domesticity, and Popular Culture
(New York: Routledge, 2009), 53.
69. Genz, Postfeminities in Popular Culture, 33–34.
70. Ibid., 85.
71. Rosalind Gilk, “Postfeminist Media Culture: Elements of a Sensibility,” European
Journal of Cultural Studies 10 (2007): 147–67.
72. Genz, Postfeminities in Popular Culture, 153.
73. Gill and Pratt, “In the Social Factory?”
74. Sara Mosle, “Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy,” Double X, Work blog,
June 10, 2009, accessed September 9, 2010, http://www.doublex.com/section/work/
etsycom-peddles-false-feminist-fantasy.
75. Alex Williams, “That Hobby Looks Like a Lot of Work,” New York Times,
December 16, 2009, accessed August 12, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/
17/fashion/17etsy.html.
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76. Gill and Pratt, “In the Social Factory?” 17.
77. Research on the gendering of post-Fordist labor has generally focused on the
increase of women’s growing significance as marginal workers, particularly in the
­context of the capitalization of caring and domestic work. See, for example, Lina
McDowell, “Life Without Father and Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism,”
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 16 (1991): 400–19; and Andrea Wigfield,
Post-Fordism, Gender, and Work (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).
78. Gilk, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” 163.
79. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007), 2.
80. Ibid., 64–65.
81. Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California,” 1176.
82. Ibid.
83. Davey, in conversation with the author, February 2010.
84. See Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York:
Crown, 1991).
85. Notably, eleven out of the fifty-five respondents said that their political or ethical
values did not inform the things that they made or how they made them. Respondents
who said that their political or ethical values did inform the things they made cited,
to summarize, using reclaimed or environmentally friendly materials and processes,
­believing in fair wages or buying from fair-trade sources, using vegan materials, and
­supporting smaller, local economies rather than large corporations. Interestingly,
many of these same values were not necessarily perceived to be politically or ethically
motivated.
86. Bethany Shorb, “Detroit Is the Freedom to Make Things,” Make: Online Blog, July 29,
2010, http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/07/freedom-to-make-things.html.
87. Guthman, “Neoliberalism and the Making of Food Politics in California,” 1176.
88. Ibid.
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