KNIT TOGETHER: CRAFTING SOFT SUPPORT STRUCTURES WITH YARN, PAIN, STICKS, AND STORIES

Abstract

This thesis is an exploration of how knitters with disabilities connect with one another through a shared project, and how the reciprocal effects of chronic illness and creativity inform the ways that knitters move with their materials throughout the project. Using queer theory and cripistemology to inform a feminist ethnography I consider what it means to live on “crip time” and be productive in a society that champions able-bodies that are not sick or in pain. Over the course of a year, I worked with five other knitters who have varying degrees and types of disabilities, to create six shawls. During this time I was able to experience how internal and external stresses cause shifts in the ways that each knitter chooses and works with various yarns and needles; the way we engage with each other both as artists and as people experiencing chronic illness; and how each of our understandings of time, productivity, and success become necessarily blurry and mobile. By making these stitches together this group of knitters created space where chronic illness and disability are no longer understood as Other. Exchanging normative time that our capitalist society demands for crip time is liberatory, and isolating all at once. Through the isolation and liberation however, crip productivity through this last year has resulted in solidarity, beauty, and strength.