E-textiles and material feminisms

To SEW a circuit? Wow! But it's totally possible, with conductive metal thread that looks exactly like cotton thread (if it were not for Naomi's revelation), to transplant the circuit we made on paper to a piece of fabric. Here is how:

But as daughter of a self-made seamstress, I am not satisfied with the needle work and craftsmanship exhibited through this primordial work. I crave for complexity and sophistication. Let's make something very decent with thread hidden at the back and with more lights on. I don't mind uprooting the previous work (it is not easy to dismantle the stitches), as long as I could work to perfection. 

What about adding a blue light? I like its cool and noble glow. But Kylie warned us of the blue light. I need to be careful with that. Since it's difficult to rework the stitches if anything wrong comes along, I'd better use the alligator clips for a test before I administer the needlework.

Ha! No problem! Now I have three colors of my desire. And they really look fantastic! 

In addition, the button works perfectly as a switch that controls the on and off of these lights.

It also fulfills my perfectionist dream of neat needlework, because the connecting threads are all invisible unless you turn it over.

Why do I develop so much fun from such a simple project? Or is it simple at all? I love this project because I am a woman and it feels so natural and intuitive to me as a woman.  Whether it is a bias or socially and culturally formed norm makes no difference here. Needle work is my thing. This is an embodiment how electricity flows--through the thread led by the needle in my hand. This is why girls are found to "take 'hands-on' leadership roles" in the e-puppetry project (Buchholz et al., 2014): "...girls gained and maintained access to electronics equipment and controlled engineering decisions through shared yet unspoken anticipated identities for female crafters embedded in sewing tools and gendered histories of crafting practices (p.16)." A change of materials matters. Instead of complaining about girls' lack of interest in STEM or suggesting overbearingly that girls should learn STEM, material feminisms..."make us realize not just how necessary it is to revise what we understand as causality, motivation, agency and subjectivity...but also to devise new, practical and ethical acts of engagement which motivate and enact change in the material continuum that constitutes educational practice (Taylor & Ivinson, 2013, p.667).

Another thing that I especially love about material feminism is that in the theory, matter is conceptualized as agentic and all sorts of bodies are recognized as have agency so that all of them are embraced "within a confederacy of meaning-making" (p.666). As a result, "it requires us to recognize the power of things and to lose some of our hubris as humans in order to see, understand and take into account the forces, capacities and energies possessed by matter, including non-humans, other-than-humans and more-than-humans (ditto)". This implies that materials are imagined to be as much alive as we are so that we can "have a conversation with them". This agrees with my experiences in every projects I tried to do with trepidation at first. For me, every endeavor was a conversation with materials, some completely new as strangers (like laser cutting) and some more familiar as acquaintances (like the needle, thread and fabric). But in each case, learning happened when I managed to start a conversation with a stranger, and through the conversation, I turned him into an acquaintance.

References

Buccholz, B., Shively, K., Peppler, K., & Wohlwend, K. (2014). Hands on, hands off: Gendered access in sewing and electronics practices. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 21(4), 1-20.

Taylor, C. A. & Ivinson, G. (2013). Material feminisms: New directions for education. Gender and Education, (25) 6, 665-670.