Jun
23

The Fabric of Resistance

This is the 500th post for Radical Cross Stitch!*

So to celebrate, I want to announce a new project that I need your help on.

One of the things that has become very clear to me in doing and talking to other people about radical craft is that political and radical craft is far from a new idea. What is also clear to me is that this amazing herstory is way too absent from history books. It seems that even feminist political action herstory books marginalise the art and creative responses to political issues.

Which means we get bullshit stories like this one from Steven Wells at The Guardian. Sorry, Steven, if you think punk invented diy and grassroots resistance and defiance, then you are sadly, sadly mistaken.

So I’m going to start a series of profiles of women activists who use craft as a way of communicating their ideas, resistance and vision. And hopefully at some point in the future, I’ll be able to collate these stories into a book.

This first post I want to start as a tribute not to any woman in particular, but a large group of women. In the 80s and 90s thousands of women participated in one of the largest and longest events of creative resistance in history. The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp ran for 19 years as a creative opposition to the military industrial complex.

The Greenham women danced, sang, shouted, cried, dressed up, knitted, painted, had babies, got arrested (many, many times), cut fences, wove webs, breastfed, wrote stories and provoked debate. And more than anything, they gave us a vision of a world of peace.

I urge you to check out this absolutely fantastic website that has been put together to archive and commemorate the 19 years of creative resistance. There is a wealth of information on that site and you could spend hours looking at it all. I will recommend if there’s only one thing you look at, make it the Fabric of Greenham video. Such a beautiful video, it brought tears to my eyes.

So my call out is for the stories of women you know in your community who use craft as a form of resistance. I’m planning on using this site as a searchable archive, but I also want to put as much information as I can into public repositories of knowledge, such as archive.org and wikipedia.org If you would like to help with this aspect of the project please get in touch.

Please email me your stories, preferably with images. I want to know names, dates and issues. But I’m especially interested in the stories behind the work. I want to know about the design processes as well as the creation process. If you want help with questions to ask people let me know.

And please don’t hold back because you think some information you have is not significant enough. Even if you just remember someone’s name from some protest back in the day, let me know because it might be a good lead for me to follow up on.

Finally, please pass this information on to people you know who might want to help collect these stories. I want this call out to go as far and wide as possible.

Love and rage
kakariki at radicalcrossstitch dot com

*Some of those posts are from the previous manifestations of this site. But those were culled quite significantly when I moved it all over.

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Tags: Craftivism, Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, herstory

Posted in Activism Craftivism Feminism Photos
7 Comments Posted by Rayna

Lilith says:

June 23, 2008 at 11:27 am

Sorry, I don’t always get the 64th degree understated in english texts… is this Steven joking or what ?
“Like the Nazis, alternative knitters have no sense of humour.” Hemmm… There I would stitch a “WTF ?”
I’m often wondering why people always think the easiest way to criticize anything is to call it a nazi thing. In this case it is particularly appropriate, as it is well known that nazis tortured people by knitting horrible swastika socks and forcing their victims to wear it ;o)
Anyway I may have understood all wrong, was this humour ? I have a doubt there, and as I am a nazi crafter with no sense of humor, you know…

Liliths last blog post..Grande question n°3 : Pourquoi tant de triskaïdécaphobiques ? Et c’est quoi cette histoire d’échelle ?

Sayraphim Lothian says:

June 24, 2008 at 1:39 am

How about the women who sewed the Eureka flag? From wikipedia:

According to Frank Cayley’s book, Flag of Stars, the flag’s five stars represent the Southern Cross, and the white cross joining the stars represents unity in defiance. Professor Geoffrey Blainey has advanced the view the Eureka flag is an Irish cross rather than a configuration of the Southern Cross.[2] The design of the flag was taken by Captain Henry Ross, one of Eureka’s miners and a Canadian expatriate, to three women, Anastasia Withers, Anne Duke and Anastasia Hayes, to sew up in time for a large rally at Bakery Hill, at 2.00pm on 29 November 1854. There is no evidence on who exactly designed the flag, although Ross was known on the diggings as the ‘bridegroom’ of the miners flag. The flag looks similar to the Federation Flag, on which it was based according to some historians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Flag

kakariki says:

June 24, 2008 at 4:40 am

Absolutely Sayraphim! I wrote about that not too long ago http://radicalcrossstitch.com/2008/06/16/hoist-your-vision-people/

I’ve begun collating stories from this site onto one page and should publish it soon as an index.

Keep em coming people!

And no Lilith I don’t think he’s joking. He just has absolutely no sense of humour, despite subliminally claiming to do so…

I suspect Steven was one of those wee boys standing on the edge of the thrash pits in Sex Pistols gigs wishing he had the courage to spit on someone… I don’t think he would recognise resistance or humour if it smacked him in the face.

Radical Cross Stitch » People like you just fuel my fire says:

June 24, 2008 at 1:11 pm

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