RADICALCROSSSTITCH

Pretty girl or riot nerd?

About a year ago I worked for one of the biggest sites on the interwebz which targets a demographic group of kids between nine and seventeen years, handling their costumer support for a couple of weeks. What I thought would be a mind numbing 9-5 job to pay the rent between semesters at Uni, turned out to be a really thrilling and interesting insight into youth culture today. After a year spent writing academic essays on cultural studies, mostly about subculture and its connection to feminism and DIY, I realised that this was a gold mine for anyone interested in girl culture.

The site caters to the idolising, fame seeking, and brand loving youngster and most of the users are girls, from all over the world. It is a mix between a game based around paper dolls and a social community where the users can chat, communicate in groups and discuss their favourite clothing brands, pop icons or basically anything. The paper doll part consists of, on the one hand, pre-made dolls and clothes based on real celebrities ranging from Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears to Kurt Cobain and Joan of Arc, and on the other your own “Me doll”, your alter ego or avatar on the site which you can make up to look exactly as you want when it comes so size, skin colour, eyes, clothes, make up, hair style and so on (as long as you keep within the socially acceptable frames that limits your choices – for example when it comes to body shape/size). It is free to sign up for an ordinary account, but to get the good stuff – buying the nicest outfits, participate in the best competitions or getting your little paws on the coolest eyeliner – you have to pay for a monthly membership and also use your parents Visa card to buy the artificial currency that is used on the site. It is basically the girl version of World of Warcraft, but instead of pretending to be a druid that uses magical positions to kill monsters you buy cute tops, shiny handbags and pretty scarves from Donna Karen.

What I find interesting about this is the subject position these girls claim for themselves in a milieu that is so connected to the female stereotype of body managing, appearance, keeping busy with making yourself up as a woman/girl, instead of using your energy to fight these stereotypes and demands. Stuff that little girls like – ponies, glitter make up, pretty dresses, boy bands, and playing dress up – are seen as cute, unimportant, commercialised and utterly harmless to society. Or as Polly Styrene, the grandmother of punk, puts it; “some people think little girls should be seen, not heard”. Being a girl is not something to be really proud of; the negative connotations of running, screaming or crying like a girl is not just expressions without meaning, they actually say something about the way we regard girls. Also, girl culture is often looked upon from a sort of “non-culture” angle; that it is just looks, an image or fad that young girls adopt one week and discard the next in favour of something new and hip. This in contrast to boy culture, or proper subculture, who is seen as lived culture where age, gender and staying true to the scene are important factors that make up cool.

I myself had (and still have) my doubts and critical thoughts about this kind of gendered, commercial marketing, targeting kids and dragging them into the consumer culture lifestyle. But spending my days answering questions from the sites users and dealing with abuse reports from its community, I discovered something that I hadn’t thought of earlier. It was what I like to call the seedy underbelly of girls, the scheming, lying, bribing, name calling, stealing, hoaxing and cheating that is raging on the site. All the things that good girls don’t do. And all this in a hyper commercialised environment, centred around looks, clothes, accessories, fame, pop culture and branding.

There are young girls coming together, creating a space and culture of their own within a pre-packaged environment, turning it into a arena of pre-teen queens forming secret gangs and cliques, using their html skills to set up mirror sites for stealing passwords, making up new personas, lying, cheating and essentially not being nice. In an odd sort of way, I found this very liberating and, well… fun. Of course I realise that little girls calling each other stuff like “you stupid crack whore” and stealing money from others isn’t a good thing. But I like the fact that this shows that they are agents in their own life, they’re not pretty dolls that just play dress up and sit quiet in a corner. Coming from a teen hood where I myself found feminism through the angry screams of the riot grrrls, a punk phenomena reclaiming the girl as something powerful, good, subversive and bursting with rage, I wish that a society that’s started to regard boy nerd culture (like WoW) as proof of creative modern youth culture, could do the same here. I think that’s what I’m trying to mirror in this cross stitch – the mash up of cuteness, cuddly cats and pastel colours together with a “I don’t owe you anything” attitude that creates its own rules and at the same time, on some level, re-thinks the whole concept of being girly.

Of course I got the quote from a Bikini Kill song.

Proper tea is theft

I made this tea cozy the other day, with a little help from the internet for tutorials and my cousin for some of the materials. The cross stitch is pretty simple and something I’ve been working on since around May Day. I really like how it turned out. I found the picture at Radical Graphics and then turned it into a pattern.

Except it’s awesome cuteness, I also like the notion of that something is brewing – that underneath the surface we can create our own little pockets of resistance and  counter culture and that one day, it might boil over into the rest of society.

You wanna make you’re own tea cozy? Here’s a tutorial and here’s the pattern that I used for this one:

Or just make up your own pattern!

Being oppressed means the absence of choices

I’m re-reading bell hooks’ Feminist theory: from margin to center right now, hence this small portrait of her. I’m thinking about removing it from the frame & making it into a patch to put on a t-shirt instead (just have to find a suitable tee).

For those of you that don’t know, bell hooks (or Gloria Jean Watkins, which is her real name) is an American writer, feminist & scholar that deals with the relationship between sexism, racism & class. I like they way she challenges the contemporary idea of feminism as a movement & an expression that could mean just anything, depending on who defines it. According to hooks, feminism must be “the struggle to end sexist oppression” & that means that the dominant liberal feminism of today, that doesn’t deal with class issues, can never be real feminism. She is relentless in her assault on white, middle class feminists (hey, that’s me!) & the movements unwillingness to acknowledge & analyze it’s own racism & class issues. But at the same time as she advocates a raging criticism against how white feminists have excluded & marginalized black women or other ethnic groups & made their own strive for equality with privileged white men the goal, she’s very clear on what has to be done: a turn towards companionship, solidarity & bonding between women (a bond that does not have it’s roots in an imagined shared role as “victim” or “oppressed”, but in shared strength & resources). She’s even written a book that is all about love. I’d really recommend reading bell hooks to anyone who’s interested in the ways that sexist, racist & class oppression works together & has to be challenged together.

Cross posted from cross yr stitches.

In English it’s called a quadrillion. In Swedish there’s not even a word for it.

First post of the new year for me. I would have liked to finish this earlier, but it took me most of December to get the stitching done.

During 2008 the situation in Zimbabwe has gone from bad to… well, catastrophic. I’ve been following the reports from Zim before, during & after the election in March last year & it feels like the whole country is turning into a black hole, like it’s slowly imploding. Zimbabwe was once a prosperous country but years of bad government & raging inflation has left it devastated & unable to care for it’s own people. The people who actually tried to do something about the situation by electing a new president but got robbed of their democratic rights by Robert Mugabe & the Zanu-PF party. Today there is no sufficient health care, hunger & cholera is killing the people, those who dare to speak up are getting arrested & are “disappearing”, Mugabe still holds his office & the talks between him & MDC about sharing government have collapsed. The money situation is bizarre, the inflation has reached heights that are pretty hard to grasp. In august 2008 it passed 11 200 000 %. As Anna Tibblin, a Swedish aid worker living in Harare, puts it: In English it’s called a quadrillion. In Swedish there’s not even a word for it.

So, with that in mind I’ve spent December working on this advent calendar. I used a pattern made from an old ANC poster (which unfortunately didn’t turn out quite as well as I’d hoped) & a quote from the anthem of neo-colonialism as I know it: the slightly bizarre Christmas song Do they know it’s Christmas? by the 80′s Band Aid project.

If you’re wondering why the dates of the calendar only goes up to 24, it’s because in Sweden we traditionally celebrate at Christmas eve, not Christmas day, so here its’ the 24th that is D-day…

sometimes they come back

I haven’t been as active here as I should be during the last couple of months. But now I have two new projects to share with you!

This first one is a simple cross stitch that I made some week ago, just to get myself going after a long period of zero inspiration. It’s a quote from some graffiti in the bathroom of a pretty run down Indian restaurant where me and my friends used to go to drink cheap beer a couple of years ago. I think it’s funny and serious at the same time – as a Swedish writer once said; to be a woman and not be a feminist is like shitting yourself in the face. All women should be feminists by birth, then it’s up to you to decide how hardcore you wanna be about it…

This second one is inspired by a song from Swedish punks Sju Svåra År, and they got the quote from Joan Jett – I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation! I love both songs and I think that this cross stitch turned out really well. I wrote a little statement about it on my own blog:

But more important is the fact that a woman that’s not afraid of expressing herself in any way, especially sexually, is still seen as a “bad woman” in societies eyes – she’s a whore, a slut, a sinner & if something bad happens to her, well maybe she deserved it. It must be very confusing growing up in todays (western) world, where the girls are bombarded with images of the “perfect” female body, with the demand on being sexy, being available, to always dress & act according to the expectations of the male eye, but at the same time balance on that thin line that separates them from “loose women”. Not to recognize their own sexuality & say fuck it, i like sleeping around, i like being myself in any way, because if they do they might be marked for life. It is amazing that the notion that a woman who sleeps around is a whore & a man that does the same is a stud is still such a unchallenged part of society. So, to not give a damn about one’s reputation, whether it be sexually or in any other way, is one of the things that might be most important in the feminist struggle today.

Birthday gift for the Scumbrigade

I know I promised to update often, a promise that I haven’t really kept… But I blame the fact that it’s summer in Sweden and there’s a tropical heat wave hitting us right now. Too hot to think or manage the blogging…

But I should at least give you my latest creation, aka “the Valerie Solanas project”.

It is of course the first paragraph/sentence from solana’s SCUM manifesto, the raging text about all that’s wrong in society. You could discuss solana’s writing & thoughts for days if you wanted to – was she a complete lunatic who committed a violent crime (she shot andy warhol!) & promoted a hateful feminist philosophy? Or was she a brilliant writer/artist that got abused & mistreated by everyone & everything in her life? I’m too tired do get into that right now (maybe i’ll edit this later) but i think that, if you’re swedish, you should pick up a copy of Sara Stridsberg’s book Drömfakulteten. iI’s a beautiful odyssey into the mind of valerie, from the authors own fantasies & conception of her. Just read it.

People like you just fuel my fire

Okay, so I know I shouldn’t let jerks like Steven Wells (that Kakariki mentioned in her latest post) piss me off as much as they do, but I just couldn’t help myself. It is probably stupid to give him the attention he so obviously craves, by letting his sexist punk scene rambles annoy me. But since I am one of those humorless feminist crafters that he’s so intimidated by, and I had some time to spend stitching yesterday, I decided to make him a little present. Think I’m gonna send it to him together with a copy of the SCUM manifesto.

This riot grrl’s a cynic

So, I’m gonna try and write an intro post for myself… I’m Johanna, I live in Stockholm, Sweden but will probably move down to northern Mozambique sometime in October this year. I got hooked on needles (no, not that kind) when I realized how easy cross stitching really is and above all, how creative you can be with design, colours and so on.

I’ve actually just been cross stitching for about a year now and it all started when I was trying to find a birthday gift for a friend and ended up with one of the cross stitch kits from Fuldesign. At first I was just gonna give it to her, but then I thought it would be fun to do the embroidery myself and put it in a nice frame and all that. And well, the rest is history… When I started searching the Internet for fellow cross stitchers who was into something more radical than flowers and puppys, I found this site and it was love at first sight I guess (so you can try to imagine what a honour it is for me to be a member of the crew now). If you haven’t done it yet, take a look at the DIY page and get inspired. It really got me started, not just with the cross stitching itself, but also got me into the politics of crafting and it’s links to DIY culture.

Being a feminist and activist I try to give the work I do some kind of political twist, even if some stuff is just for fun (or gifts to friends and family). Most of the cross stitch that I’ve finished are already posted on my blog cross yr stitches (and I think they will end up in the gallery here as well), but I thought I’d give you a few samples.
A gift I made for a friend, think it’s been posted here once before. The quote is from a fundraising letter by american politician Pat Robertson.

This one might actually be my favorite, I made it as a housewarming gift for my father and it says and then there are idiots who can find comfort in art (quote from Jean-Paul Sartre). Sort of a comment to all the self obsessed male artists of the world…

The mini backdrop I made for the swedish punk band Wolfbrigade (if you look closely on the front cover of their next album, you’ll see it featured on Dadde’s drum kit).

That’s all for now… promise to try and update pretty often. Right now I’m working on four different projects that I hope I’ll finish sometime soon. Stay tuned kids!