#TLDR: Sociology and because people use and share and have expectations about craft patterns because capitalism

[mctreeleth]

What’s your major since you said the quilted plague mask was for research for you PHD?

I double majored in Sociology and Womens’ Studies, and my PhD supervisors research and teach Sociology and Cultural Studies.

The mask was not created to be part of my research. I was struggling with motivation last week and my frustration was making work harder and I was snowballing stress. My therapist said to go do something else, and my brain smushed together the fact that everyone was sewing face masks out of printed quilting cotton with plague doctor masks, and so I made it happen, because, why not? And then people were super into it, and asking for a pattern, and offering to buy a pattern, and I was like… oh shit. This is research now.

Backstory; I did my honours thesis on the use of norms to regulate acceptable practices of pattern and design sharing and use in the quilting community. My original research had three parts. The first was going through a lot of blogs and facebook pages and comments sections about quilting and finding examples of members of the community making assertions as to what could or couldn’t be done. The next bit was the same, but looking for cases where members of the group had attempted to enact sanctions on individuals whose actions had been deemed deviant. This was usually in the form of someone asking for a pattern and them being strongly criticised for doing so, or someone saying that you aren’t allowed to copy patterns and… being roundly criticised for doing so. Norms are enforced by call-out posts, basically. The third bit was doing surveys and interviews of quilters to find out about their own attitudes, how they came to these views, and any examples they had seen of conflicts or sanctions taking place.

Then this research got considered in in conjunction with the existing academic literature. 

Firstly, there are other communities that use norms-based Intellectual property systems like the one employed by the anti-copying half of the quilting community, but the pushback against the them isn’t there as much. Stand-up comedians, magicians and Michelin-starred chefs generally agree to not recreate one another’s creations. The question then is, why do quilters?

So then I had to look at, what about quilting as a craft makes people feel that copying is the done thing? The assertions of intellectual property rights without any confirmed legal framework aren’t as important - they are happening elsewhere too - what matters is that aforementioned pushback against these norms. Part of it is technical - the geometric nature of quilts, and the fact that their entire design is literally flat out visible on them, mean that you can copy a quilt without ever seeing a pattern. And the second part is historical - that that is exactly what happened. Quilt “patterns” were not patterns as we would think of them, they were sketches of a block configuration, shared so much that we no longer know where they started.

So we know what is happening - an IP-favouring norm system has taken hold in the quilting community, but there is pushback against this because of quilting’s history. 

That was meant to be my Honours thesis, and then I was going to look at why the IP-favouring norms had come to be for my PhD. But I inadvertently came to the conclusion a little too early that the IP favouring norms were tied to the commodification of creative pursuits as part of the whole idea that, if you are good at something, never do it for free. So then my honours thesis also contained a lot of stuff regarding how society values the works of women, particularly the art/craft divide, and the notion of feminine hobbies such as quilting being undertaken for love, plus some real-talk economic realities about the prospects of actually making money from quilting.

And that meant that I had answered my PhD question in my honours thesis. 

I gave some pretty serious thought to not actually doing a PhD - I had started this whole thing in order to interrogate my own views towards the arguments I had been observing for over a decade, and achieved that goal. I spent about 4 months flip flopping on the decision, but it seemed like a wasted opportunity to not at least apply. And I got accepted, and had to come up with an actual research question.

I spent 6 weeks over the summer mainly chilling next to the river in my hometown, and came to realise that the little old ladies resisting putting a price on quilt designs might have something big to teach us about resisting the post-fordist neoliberal capitalist rhetoric that underpins modern society. So that was my PhD. Can I take the arguments they use in resistance towards the IP-based norms system in quilting and draw from them to challenge the valorisation of hustle culture?

I have made a lot of quilts over the last decade, but I have never used a pattern, because I am in Australia and I really like the metric system, whereas most quilt patterns are in inches. But my supervisor and I had discussed the idea of me writing some patterns and putting them out there; tracking what happened to them, seeing if they got quote unquote “stolen”, maybe even for the hell of it publishing something with an aesthetic similarity to a popular quilt pattern that was also rooted in a traditional quilt block, just to see if I could get called out and start conflict. But I also wanted to know what it was like on the other side, to have worked very hard on something and then put it out there for people to use. To have people saying that this piece of your work is worth x amount to them. To know that your creation will be used in ways outside of your control. For people to feel entitled to your work, or for people to feel like your work isn’t good enough, that it was not worth their “investment”.

But we are only 6 weeks in, and this would be something I would do second year, maybe, if we did it at all. I would need ethics clearance, and to write about my motivations beforehand, and tie it to the literature to explain what I thought would happen.

I did not think that I would make a pattern as a distraction a month and a half in and get to do all that so soon. Plus I kind of threw the impartiality by adding terms of use that were aggressively the opposite of most of the claims you see on sewing patterns. But that was my little treat to me.

And now it is part of my research because it is a way to have people tell me about their experiences and attitudes, whether that be explicit “this is what I think is okay and this is what has happened to me” stories, or examples of the pervasiveness of commodification in people asking where they could buy the pattern. 

More helpfully, it is letting me articulate in a different medium and to a different audience aspects of my research, and why I care about it so much. Two weeks ago I was basically bashing my head against a wall trying to explain what I was going for to a blank word document. It feels a lot easier to try to explain it to curious people on the internet.

And it is all thanks to a dumb idea about how, if I am going to sew a dubiously effective fabric mask, I want it to look dope as shit.

#slyfox101honk #This got long I am so so sorry #But I can't explain why it is research without explaining what I am researching #TLDR: Sociology and because people use and share and have expectations about craft patterns because capitalism