In Mathew Arthur鈥檚 course GSWS 321 鈥淢aking Feminisms: Technoscience, Disability, DIY,鈥� students explore concepts and methods from feminist science and technology studies, cyberfeminisms, and disability studies through hands-on critical making practices that include origami, crochet, beading, cooking, board game design, and more. Across disciplines and activist movements, feminist concepts inform and are formed around bodies, things, books, devices, artworks, buildings, and places. Together, we experiment with how feminist theories are made and what they can make.
Making Feminisms: An Experiment in Experimentation
By Morgan Legal, Sybil Willoughby, and Gurkirt Rai
GSWS 321 鈥淢aking Feminisms鈥� is a course that explores DIY practices through a feminist lens, engaging concepts from feminist science and technology studies (FSTS). It is a wild ride through dense theoretical discussions, origami, crochet and more. Through open-ended assignments we thought with particular making practices and projects in creative experimentation. Each class invited us to think deeply about the practices that make everything (including yarn, computers, and corn). We used a variety of methods to inquire about the material, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of things and the practices that make them.
FSTS is central to the theoretical toolbox used to think with DIY practices in 鈥淢aking Feminisms.鈥� It is an interdisciplinary 鈥渘on-discipline鈥� open to a multiplicity of perspectives. FSTS embraces complexity, difference, and change through practices like 鈥渋mplosion鈥� which encourage you to pick apart the vast network of relations (be them human or otherwise) embedded in the most unassuming objects, like a ball of yarn. With concepts like 鈥渘on-innocence,鈥� FSTS is deeply committed to the intersection of materials, politics, and aesthetics. It rejects notions of objectivity that don't see science as a collection of situated practices. By paying attention to practices, FSTS asks what things do rather than what things are. These methods immerse participants into the many everyday worlds that we walk through without noticing鈥攚orlds of creative practice, scientific research, and the minutiae of everyday life.
The 鈥淢aking Feminisms鈥� classroom asks students to participate in novel ways. We often came to class expecting something completely different than what we were met with. Each class there are new exercises: crocheting, origami, board game-making, 鈥渋mplosions,鈥� and more. Even the physical configuration of chairs and tables in the class were subject to experimentation. The instructor would have us weigh in on what we thought best for a particular activity. Then, we would move the furniture together. The course culminated in a modified 鈥渟tudio day,鈥� making for an especially lively last day and encouraging us to learn not just from the instructor but from each other as well. Hands-on experimentation, student connection, and enthusiasm made this class special.
The mid-term assignment asked, 鈥淗ow does the process of making instructions give insight on how knowledges are crafted, archived, shared, interpreted, or misunderstood?鈥� Students reflected on how sex, gender, and race show up in making practices鈥攁nd how steps and materials might be 鈥渉acked鈥� for accessibility. Gendersploit, Communication student Morgan Legal鈥檚 digital making project, intermixes the practices of hackers and trans people, exploring the ways that trans people use the internet as a tool for sharing tricks and hacks often needed to interface with medico-legal institutions during transition.
By-Places, a collaborative DIY zine by Sociology and Anthropology student Sybil Willoughby and Morgan Legal made for the final 鈥淢aking Feminisms鈥� assignment, is part of a larger project exploring the practices and co-composition of small out of the way places in the city with a focus on affect and impersonal collectivity.
Reflecting on feminist politics of knowledge transmission and the question 鈥淲hat does it have to do with nonhumans?,鈥� Bachelor of General Studies in Education student Gurkirt Rai writes,
Yogurt is the growth of live and healthy bacteria that produce a different world as it ferments. Likewise, oral histories ferment with time, they form different realities that use material things to create new stories. By viewing yogurt as an active storyteller, the inherited yogurt starter connects the different worlds from which it comes.
Student Biographies
Morgan Legal is an avid book reader, cyberfeminist, and a Communications student in her second year at 丁香园AV.
Sybil Willoughby collects books on affect theory and process philosophy, produces electronic music, and has been a Sociology/Anthropology undergrad for three years.
Gurkirt Rai is a fourth-year Bachelor of General Studies in Education with minors in Social Justice in Education, Early Learning, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women鈥檚 Studies.