“It Tells You What it Wants to Be”. How Women Make, with Immanence, Love, Decay and other Transgressions

Abstract

This paper discusses how a close encounter with a woman’s making practice, when viewed through a critical feminist lens, can give space to a broader discus- sion on how female creative labour is viewed and valued. Drawing on a 2018 doc- toral thesis titled ’How women make – exploring female making practice through design anthropology’, the focus here is firstly, on how conceptions of immanence in a making practice have implications for ontological concepts of agency and, secondly, on the re-working of normative identity positions within women’s differ- ent crafting and up-cycling practices. These in turn point to certain conceptions of the feminine in the public realm and how visual and material voice is perceived based on gender. Different opportunities for subversion materialise in the wom- en’s work through the interplay of concepts of beauty, femininity, nature, decay and death. The discussion highlights excerpts of a series of close up vignettes, which combined ethnographic, auto-ethnographic accounts and reflections informed by feminist theory and critique.

Keywords

• female making
• immanence
• design ontology
• material agency
• feminist design critique