COVID as Glitch: (Re)Visioning and (Re)Crafting a Feminist Future

Many scholars and commentators argue that the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the ways in which feminism has failed women. While women, particularly in marginalized communities, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, I contend that we should approach it as an opportunity to reenvision, and even shape, what feminist futures can look like. The pandemic provoked an increased interest in crafting, both because of quarantine conditions and the need for many requiring masks to slow viral transmission. The COVID-19 pandemic, then, serves as the tipping point by which craft can and does function as resistive and transformative feminist work with the potential to “glitch” oppressive systems. Building on the research of Shira Chess, Tricia Hersey, and especially Legacy Russell’s vision of “Glitch Feminism,” I argue that craft is a vital way to reconfigure our theory and practice about what constitutes appropriate work, play, and rest. Reenvisioned, craft and other forms of making are embodied, resistive actions anchored in an ethic of care for self and others, thereby offering us practical examples of “glitch feminism” at a key point in time. The pandemic is not only a tipping point, but also a springboard for glitching the system in an effort to create more just and equitable futures for all

DIY Methods 2022 Conference Proceedings

As the past years have proven, the methods for conducting and distributing research that we’ve inherited from our disciplinary traditions can be remarkably brittle in the face of rapidly changing social and mobility norms. The ways we work and the ways we meet are questions newly opened for practical and theoretical inquiry; we both need to solve real problems in our daily lives and account for the constitutive effects of these solutions on the character of the knowledge we produce. Methods are not neutral tools, and nor are they fixed ones. As such, the work of inventing, repairing, and hacking methods is a necessary, if often underexplored, part of the wider research process. This conference aims to better interrogate and celebrate such experiments with method. Borrowing from the spirit and circuits of exchange in earlier DIY cultures, it takes the form of a zine ring distributed via postal mail. Participants will craft zines describing methodological experiments and/or how-to guides, which the conference organisers will subsequently mail out to all participants. Feedback on conference proceedings will also proceed through the mail, as well as via an optional Twitter hashtag. The conference itself is thus an experiment with different temporalities and medialities of research exchange. As a practical benefit, this format guarantees that the experience will be free of Zoom fatigue, timezone difficulties, travel expenses, and visa headaches. More generatively, it may also afford slower thinking, richer aesthetic possibilities, more diverse forms of circulation, and perhaps even some amount of delight. The conference format itself is part of the DIY experiment

The alternative tradition of womanhood in nineteenth-century African-American women\u27s writings

This thesis examines the ways in which three African-American women writers challenge the racist and sexist implications of the nineteenth-century cult of true womanhood and create an alternative path of womanhood accessible to women of color. The alternate tradition they generate allows these three women writers to break the silences and challenge the roles imposed upon them by dominant cultural practices. The three authors and texts under examination include Harriet E. Wilson\u27s Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859); Harriet Jacobs\u27s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); and Frances E. W. Harper\u27s Iola Leroy; Or, Shadows Uplifted (1892). These texts challenge the ways that the cult of true womanhood operates as an ideal which deny black women access. At the same time, I consider how these writers locate conflicts within the ideal of true womanhood and generate a tradition of writing closely aligned with both the white and black feminist movements