edgeofcenter.com

Last weekend, I scrubbed my living room floor… and there are few things that will throw one head-first into a visceral appreciation for the lived experience of pre-modern women like scrubbing a wood floor, on hands and knees, in long skirts.

(Why would anyone do that? Of course you’re wondering. It’s pretty simple, actually, in two parts. First, I have a severe chronic back pain condition, and it is far, far less painful – both while I’m doing the work, and for hours or even days afterward – to get down there and scrub than to push a heavy mop from a standing position. And second, the weather’s just a little too cool for shorts… and given the choice between tucking my skirts up around my hips and having wet, dirty, naked knees that I can quickly wipe off when I take a break, or wet, dirty, sticky jeans that I can only escape by peeling them off completely… yeah. I’ll take the former every time. In fact, when I’m doing any kind of serious cleaning, I’m almost always wearing either a sarong or an old, beat-up broomstick skirt.)

It got me thinking again about something I’ve been toying around with for years, but never really articulated – the idea of cosplay, historical re-enactment, and amateur experimental archaeology as a feminist act. The idea first occurred to me while reading Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s famous anecdote about the Hallstadt Plaid reconstruction (you can read it on Google Books, in the introduction to Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years) and again throughout the book, but the seed was planted a few years before that, watching Rob Roy with some friends, commenting on Jessica Lange’s discreet and effortless pee stop while out on the moors – so discreet that one person didn’t recognize what she was doing until we laughingly explained it. Someone else said, “Oh, I always wear skirts when I’m camping! It makes things like that so much easier!” I was twenty-three, and it was a rabbit-hole moment.

Since then, I’ve been poking at the dual beliefs that women in history have had little agency in defining their lives, and that it’s impossible to know much about the day-to-day lives of pre-modern people – and especially women – because so little is written, and material culture studies are so hard. There’s a core of truth in both assertions – but it’s as overarching narratives that they come to actually interfere with the practice of archaeology and historical cultural studies, and it’s in challenging them that we begin to reveal just how much can be known, and just how much women could and did shape their own lives and the world around them. And much of that challenging takes place, must take place, in the embodied and experiential modes of study. It’s in the wearing of the veils, the fermenting of the beverages, the warping of the loom, the execution of the rituals, the donning of the ornamentation, the singing of the songs, that we begin to understand. Knowledge that was never passed pen to paper to eye, can still be uncovered, hand to object to hand.

So much of what I do, in artistic and scholarly terms, takes so much time. That’s part of the point. I spend days, weeks, months – not hours – intimately navigating material meaning, speaking the body-language of my ancestors, practicing it, experimenting with it, repeating the same movements and motifs over and over – and only then expanding on it, flourishing. One begins to understand how a design can remain unchanged for a thousand years. One begins to appreciate the elegance, the evolution, of things.

(It always makes me laugh, when people express astonishment that I wear corsets by choice. “European women would not have submitted to four hundred years of corsets if they weren’t comfortable and functional.” Women who have never donned a corset in their lives insist I must be wrong. Who are they to say?)

When I strive for precision and authenticity in the making and wearing of historical costume, as I do in my medieval re-enactment hobbies, I am honoring the lives of the women for whom it was merely clothing. (And, not incidentally, honoring the labor of those scholars – also mostly women, mostly unknown outside their specialties – for whom it has been a life’s work. Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Margarethe Hald. Audriene Bliujiene.  Janet Arnold. Valerie Steele. So many more they can hardly be counted.)

When I explore the possibilities and boundaries of historical costume, as I do in steampunk and fantastical cosplay, I am honoring the imaginative possibilities of the female experience, juxtaposing the roles women really did and continue to play with all of the infinite and varied roles that they might.

And when I integrate historical textile technologies into studio work, turning handspinning, handweaving, embroidery, yarncraft, and piecework into fine art, or creating functional fine art garments, I am contextualizing those technologies on a continuous spectrum – not History divorced from Present, but living handcrafts, continually reinvented. Women’s work.

The artwork is inseparable from the life work – the wildcrafting, gardening, canning, cooking, cleaning, practical sewing and knitting, childrearing, that also connects me with generations of kindred. And finally there’s the writing, the privilege of my generation that I can do all of these things and put my stories down in words that I choose. That these things will not be forgotten. Pen to paper, hand to hand.