Workshops: Goods

Workshop 16: Text(s)tiles: Gender in the Making of Cloth;
Cloth in the Making of Gender

Conveners:

• Erna Kelly, English, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
• Barbara Ann McCahill, History, Bradford College
• Elizabeth Mazzola, English, City University of New York
• Christina Yocca, Art, Tyler School of Art, Temple University

This workshop explored the participation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Northern European women in textile production, consumption and decoration in two main discussion segments: one on women's use of textiles (embellishing them, constructing costumes from them, etc.); the other on the gendering of textile and written text production. Some questions we considered included (but were not limited to) Did textile work empower women or take power from them? How did women use this activity to create messages? What messages were sent, to whom, and what effect did they have? What did men gain and/or lose from an association of textiles with women? How much of this association is a twentieth-century construct? What is the relationship between the production of textiles and the production of texts? How/where do their boundaries blur? How do class, workspace and display space enter into our explorations? Participants were furnished beforehand with short excerpts from twentieth-century scholarship and from early modern texts as well as with a square of cloth, an early modern needlework pattern, etc. in the hope that these would generate questions and insights that participants would bring to the workshop.