L.J. Roberts

In the Making: Rhetoric of Craft

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In the past decade, several prominent American cultural and educational institutions have dropped the word craft from their names. Why do they deem this word inappropriate or undesirable? To understand why craft has become so troubling within the institutional framework of material culture, one must interrogate its current linguistic and cultural meanings. By historically and critically unraveling the many definitions of craft and the rhetoric that forms them, a web of hierarchies is revealed that links this contentious term with specific notions of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and queerness. These associations have led some to regard craft unfavorably while providing others with an empowering space in which to work.

This study reveals how the contemporary categorical triad of design, art, and craft emerged to become the most prevalent classification system in contemporary material culture. Specifically I focus on how the rhetoric of the constructed category of craft was displaced and came to occupy a space of otherness and nonnormativity. Rather than accepting this marginalization as negative, contemporary craft criticism can in fact benefit from insights gleaned from the field of queer theory, which has employed its otherness as an agent to reclaim and proliferate a culturally denigrated rhetoric—as well as an actual identity.

This project establishes a historical framework, examining the rise of industrial capitalism, William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement, subsequent splinter craft movements, and the aesthetic tenets of Modernism using Marxist, feminist, and poststructuralist theory. An examination of the rhetorics of craft illuminates how and why many forms of craft are pushed into stagnant, repetitive stereotypes that are fixed and subsequently denied growth. Finally, borrowing a template from queer theory, the project proposes a new and progressive critical craft theory that is able to represent diverse experience while avoiding rigidity and stagnation.