Women's hobbies
So, I had dental surgery on Friday (went pretty well, thanks) and I've been laid up all weekend watching Slings and Arrows, vacuuming the air-conditioner, and knitting a sock. Bear with me, because the last one of those is actually important.
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee is one of the best-known knitting bloggers in North America. Her blog has thousands and thousands of readers -- well over a thousand just on Bloglines-- she's published four books (I recommend Knitting Rules), and she has raised over three hundred thousand dollars for Doctors without Borders from her blog. And she consistently has the problem of bookstores turning down her events, or doing things like putting out ten chairs for a reading. In her hometown (Toronto) kickoff event, the bookstore, part of the Indigo chain, estimated thirty attendees. Please to click through here and here to see how misguided they were -- off by as much as an order of magnitude.
So Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, who was in her pre-knitterly-fame days a lactation consultant, knows a lot about women's work and women's interests and how they get undervalued. As a result, her entire current tour is meant as a visibility event -- they are collecting handknit hats for homeless shelters, and the theme of her talks have been precisely the invisibility of knitters and knitting, and the importance of standing up for both of them. As one attendee recounted it, she talked about the 'cultural humiliation' of knitters, and used the terrific example of Blue Moon Fiber Arts, the company that faced a financial crisis earlier this year when their bank refused their credit card orders, figuring there was no way hundreds of TWO THOUSAND people would join a sock-yarn of the month club and they had to be doing something fraudulent.
Surely, some of the dots connecting this to the current upheavals in fandom, and the continuing invisibility of "fangirl culture," to use Jenkins's term, are fairly obvious by now. If it's not clear enough, Pearl-McPhee even calls non-knitters "muggles."
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee is one of the best-known knitting bloggers in North America. Her blog has thousands and thousands of readers -- well over a thousand just on Bloglines-- she's published four books (I recommend Knitting Rules), and she has raised over three hundred thousand dollars for Doctors without Borders from her blog. And she consistently has the problem of bookstores turning down her events, or doing things like putting out ten chairs for a reading. In her hometown (Toronto) kickoff event, the bookstore, part of the Indigo chain, estimated thirty attendees. Please to click through here and here to see how misguided they were -- off by as much as an order of magnitude.
So Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, who was in her pre-knitterly-fame days a lactation consultant, knows a lot about women's work and women's interests and how they get undervalued. As a result, her entire current tour is meant as a visibility event -- they are collecting handknit hats for homeless shelters, and the theme of her talks have been precisely the invisibility of knitters and knitting, and the importance of standing up for both of them. As one attendee recounted it, she talked about the 'cultural humiliation' of knitters, and used the terrific example of Blue Moon Fiber Arts, the company that faced a financial crisis earlier this year when their bank refused their credit card orders, figuring there was no way hundreds of TWO THOUSAND people would join a sock-yarn of the month club and they had to be doing something fraudulent.
Surely, some of the dots connecting this to the current upheavals in fandom, and the continuing invisibility of "fangirl culture," to use Jenkins's term, are fairly obvious by now. If it's not clear enough, Pearl-McPhee even calls non-knitters "muggles."