Page 107 - Constructing Craft
P. 107
He added:
Characteristics of such subcultures tend to also include strong
group identification, an adherence to traditional values, a
certain defensiveness about their discipline, an inability to
distinguish between effort and excellence, and an unwillingness
to acknowledge the distinction between hobbyist and the
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committed artist.
The Debate and Women
Women encountered more than one difficulty when confronted with the debate
about whether craft could be art or indeed whether specific forms of craft might be
excluded because the majority of practitioners were women. Bourdieu contended
that women, along with other groups in society, had been subjected to hierarchies
of limitations that he called ‘symbolic violence’. ‘Symbolic violence’ is a term used to
describe how unconscious force is used by one group in society to convince
another group that they are in some way inferior or that their values are less
important. Women were often unaware this was happening but the gender
imbalance in some crafts such as weaving and the large number of women involved
with craft in comparison to the number of well-known women artists, provide some
evidence that, in the early days of the movement at least, this argument could be
made. In addition, feminist writers claimed that the number of ‘famous’ women
artists was small because they had been excluded from history by male writers and,
furthermore, they argued that the inferior position of craft was a gender-based form
of segregation.
Male writers also used the dominance of women in some crafts to suggest that
symbolic violence encouraged women to engage in some forms of craft rather than
others. In a New Zealand Listener article in 1988, commenting on an exhibition
called ‘In Stitches’, Peter Gibbs, the New Zealand Listener’s arts writer, noted that
although more than 4000 people (presumably mostly women) were members of the
fifty guilds that made up the Association of New Zealand Embroiderers’ Guilds, the
craft was not considered a mainstream art form. He claimed that, ‘In spite of the
vast support it enjoys from women, it is not taught in the white male institutions, nor
Constructing Craft