Blog no.10 07/09/23
Over the break, I've been reading Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology and some other academic texts relating to queer theory and experience. Looking at my project through a phenomenological lens has made me rethink how I can centre the "importance of lived experience" and explore how "repeated and habitual actions" (Ahmed, 2006, p. 2) shape experiences of gender. The idea of occupation and what objects we are oriented towards is a continuous point of discussion in Ahmed's book. I relate this to my other craft readings as a method to understand one's body and orientation. In Soft Circularity (2017), Melissa Susan Rogers describes crafting as a method for untangling "ordinary shapes and feelings of embodied life", weaving these two ways of interpreting experience, especially queer and trans experience; I have articulated this through a translated triangle motif.
Quilting is an excellent example of how repetition and translation of ordinary shapes can be used to explore and communicate ideas. In reworking the brand identity for Crafting Allies, I took a very simple, uniform square shape. I simply rotated, flipped and repeated it (a process of quilting and many other crafts that take fundamental action and, through iteration and repetition, create an object with imbued meanings). Of course, centring around gender and especially the queer experience of crafting one's gender through conscious and unconscious repetition of gender performance (a nod to Judith Butler here) and iteration of this performance over time. I see the gendered scripts (Butler, 1988) we are given as the original square or triangle, and how one plays with that shape through subversion or reproduction creates the nuance of our gender or the shape I arrived at. Beyond gender theory, the motif itself is one that is commonly used in quilts because the pattern piece can be reused to create the fabric pieces. Pictorially, the motif suggests a star shape, where associations with being gender expansive and joyous arise. Secondarily there is a suggestion of gathering around a table which directly links to the workshops.
The other icons are the beginning of a play with the original square and triangle. They can become symbols for different stages of my process in the documentation or just icons for the website, adding to the overall identity of Crafting Allies. The colours, kept from earlier iterations of the logo, are pulled from the trans flag and made more saturated because of the modern corporate associations of bold colours (something I noticed in visual research). I have to appeal to my audience, after all.
References:
Ahmed, S. (2006). Queer phenomenology. In Duke University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388074
Butler, J. (1988). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution : An essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 73–83. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203567234-13
Rogers, M. S. (2017). Soft Circuitry: Methods for Queer and Trans Feminist Maker Cultures [PhD Dissertation]. University of Maryland.
