Craftivity Narratives:
Fabriculture, Affective Labor, and the New Domesticity
Near the door inside a NYC East Village coffee shop is posted a simple xeroxed sheet. It
announces the weekly meeting of Knit Club and lists the rules of Knit Club (first rule:
don’t speak about Knit Club outside Knit Club). The humor derived from the
hypermasculinization of a knitting circle (via David Fincher’s Fight Club) finds a more
popular expression as well: the absurdist spectacle of The Style Network’s Craft Corner
Deathmatch. Juxtaposing the placid traditional domestic arts with the aggressive
competitive contests of shows like Junkyard Wars and BattleBots engenders a humor of
incongruity, but also provokes broader questions about gender, technology, and popular
culture.
In this paper we analyze the recent popularization of DIY craft culture. We
evaluate craft culture, or “fabriculture,” around three major knots: 1) the spaces of
production, especially as they are gendered; 2) the relationship between old and new
technology, or how the digital and the handicraft are interwoven. 3) how this popular
cultural form poses new questions about activism, or craftivism. We seek to interlace
crafting with popular media culture while at the same time questioning the binary
between old and new media. While cyberculture and digital culture seem inherently
opposed to the archaic practices of weaving, spinning, and crafting, we situate
fabriculture within this field of new media study. As a resurgence of the “private” into the
public sphere (materially and virtually), fabriculture reopens the politics of domesticity.
These gendered spaces are also tied to questions of value regarding traditionally defined
“women’s work”. Finally, fabriculture poses new questions surrounding gender and
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Convention