Making Matters
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Craft is a process-oriented practice that takes seriously the relationships between bodies—both human and nonhuman—and makes apparent how these relationships are mired in and informed by power structures. Making Matters introduces craft agency, a feminist vision of new materialist rhetorics that enables scholars to identify how power circulates and sometimes stagnates within assemblages of actors and provides tools to rectify that uneven distribution.
To recast new materialist rhetorics as inherently crafty, Leigh Gruwell historicizes and locates the concept of craft both within rhetorical history as well as in the disciplinary history of writing studies. Her investigation centers on three specific case studies: craftivism, the fibercraft website Ravelry, and the 2017 Women’s March. These instances all highlight how a material, ecological understanding of rhetorical agency can enact political change.
Craft agency models how we humans might work with and alongside things—nonhuman, sometimes digital, sometimes material—to create more equitable relationships. Making Matters argues that craft is a useful starting point for addressing criticisms of new materialist rhetorics not only because doing so places rhetorical action as a product of complex relationships between a network of human and nonhuman actors, but also because it does so with an explicitly activist agenda that positions the body itself as a material interface.
Leigh Gruwell is assistant professor of English at Auburn University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing and rhetoric. Her research centers on digital, feminist, and new materialist rhetorics as well as composition pedagogy and research methodologies.