Making, gender, and doing

boing
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That sounds great, and my husband is like that too. But to think that because your experiences or my daughters are like that or because people can and do forge alternatives, that a problem doesn’t exist is a bit myopic.

I think that’s right and I agree, but there is also the ability of some people to have access to more room and more land. So what the article is address also has a class dimension. The space to experiment with making, doing, crafting, etc, comes from having free time. More and more, working class families just don’t have that as they used to. If you can afford a house with a basement or a garage, with room to have a workshop, you’re likely middle class and in a privileged position.

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This is great way to put it and I agree. But she’s addressing the notion that DIY has been somewhat co-opted and corporatized, I think. We need to really struggle with how effectively culture is co-opted and monetized in the modern capitalist system. Making has been more easily co-opted I think than caregiving or maintaining, I’d argue. I’m not arguing that this makes our acts of making, doing, caring, maintaining, etc less valuable or worthwhile, just that it’s also been co-opted, especially by the rhetoric of silicon valley (the land of neo-liberalism) and thus it continues to be a gendered term…

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It was worth the hard work, cause that’s a thing of beauty!

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I couldn’t agree more. But I think it’s the undergrad level where this starts to have a real impact, in terms of what people imagine is possible for their future careers and start making moves to make that a reality.

Agreed.

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I think it’s possible to miss the forest for the trees here. I don’t think the issue she’s talking about is really about sewing (or makeup, or knitting) vs woodworking (or mechanical work). Those of course are really gendered things. Even when they’re the same thing. (consider fashion design vs home sewing, chefs vs cooks, teachers vs professors, nurses vs doctors. things are considered much more substantial and productive and valuable when they’re gendered male). She’s talking about a deeper divide, one which is also gendered, where service is considered less valuable than production- which can be seen in the examples I just gave, where the chefs/designers/professors/doctors are thought of as far more active- reshaping the world (or their slice of it) around them, and the teachers/nurses/seamstresses are doing lesser, supplementary work: not creative, not productive, not masterful. Not requiring of special genius; interchangeable.

And this is how we end up in a place where, for example, workplaces consider domestic responsibilities as unimportant, a distraction, rather than just part of everyone’s life. I mean, if this weren’t true, men wouldn’t have to be pushed into taking parental leave (in the places where it is offered). I have yet to meet a new father who doesn’t value time with his child as much as a new mother, but the attitudes are such that taking time out to do that is considered a sign of flakiness, of the wrong priorities, of femininity (and all the negative baggage that goes with that). Except we’re all counting on there being future generations to keep society functioning when we get old. And just as we all need laundry and groceries and a all the other household chores to live (and work), the business world is set up where the only way to succeed is to have someone else doing all that for you. Because it’s not considered just part of life.

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Better to be a “cult member” in a workshop than to be led into a philosophical quagmire where time goes to die.

Yes. But unlike the other ways, it gets things made.

Question whatever you want. But if you try to bring it out of your chatting circle into the shop area, don’t wonder when you get chased away with a nail attached to a broomstick.

Makers/hackers/engineers make. Philosophers and ideologues talk about how the former should do it, and because the former ignore the latter, we have technology instead of continuation of an endless debate if it is wise to get off the trees and try that crazy biped walking thing.

An ill-fitting beginner-knit-job sock is a more useful thing than a week of discussions how the activity should be called. And repeated attempts are likely to result in a better sock, but the repeated ideological debate will be the same at best.

Who can make, makes. Who can’t, talks about it.

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I bought Craft magazine when it came out because it had content in it that Make magazine didn’t. At the time, I never really noticed a big difference in the way the 2 magazines looked - the format was the same. Prior to its publication, there had been a lot of discussion about how some people wanted to see less electronics and more craft type articles in Make, and others didn’t want to see it get too diluted. Maker Media’s solution was to put out a 2nd magazine, Craft. Though it was fun to look through, as it turned out a lot of the content in Craft didn’t appeal to me the way that Make did so I didn’t subscribe to it. Apparently I wasn’t the only one as the magazine wasn’t able to sustain publication of the print version. They did feel the content was worthy of keeping though as is evidenced by the fact craftzine still exists. My point is, the color of the logo going from Make’s red to Crafts pink was never a factor in my wanting to purchase the magazine or not. If anything, the magazine itself still had something of a masculine vibe to it IMO.

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You’re a fool.

My “chatting circle”, the person I cited earlier who framed the way I look at these things, is among the hardest working factory employees imaginable, a trans woman who lost a bit of her finger to a large industrial saw. I’ve witnessed the brutality of manufacturing, working alongside her there for a good amount of time, and I continue to work with my hands for a living and for personal fulfillment. You’ve made a lot of assumptions about me that you can’t make in order to invalidate my willingness to be considerate of others’ experience. I feel strongly because I’ve seen that making has social consequences and isn’t by definition good.

But my earlier point was how big the word is and I’m not talking about engineering, the word you brought up; the problem of the conversation Chachra started here is that people aren’t talking about the same things because the words (and their associated movements) are too general.

There’s a great thing Julian assange once said about the early days of wikileaks and how efficient and cooperative government contractors were; he refers to them as “death engineers”, recognizing admiringly their efficacy at “just getting things done” but also what exactly they were “just getting done”. What you do (and how) is as important as that you do it.

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While corporations will try and co-opt, brand, and market the maker movement to those that can afford their products, the concept of “making” itself has no class barrier. I’ve seen things made by people living in rural areas of the poorest countries in the world that have blown me away in regards to ingenuity and what they were able to accomplish with what they had available to them. THAT is what making is about. Making doesn’t necessarily have to require large sums of money and a fully equipped workshop. Even though I have privileged status and have access to modern equipment, I am humbled by what can be created by someone with more skill, creativity, and perhaps more time.

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I think a lot of new fathers are concerned about the costs involved and spend more time working to cover them (especially if the mother can’t work and isn’t getting enough maternity pay to cover these expenses). I know I spent quite a bit of extra time working when my daughter was born, and it wasn’t because I was worried about people’s opinion.

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That only makes sense in regards to waged positions: why would someone on a salary do it (and they do) if not worried about how it looked? (e.g. trying to ensure the job is secure).

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What I find interesting is the perspective that certain occupations (i.e. teaching or nursing) might currently lack in prestige because they were traditionally pursued by women. Moreover, I don’t actually know if women were restricted to jobs considered unimportant or if these jobs were considered unimportant because they were thought of as “women’s work”.

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Maybe. Time will show.

The beauty of engineering/sci/tech is that you can be a white cis male (and still not be a pariah) or a little green Martian, your nonverbal comm skills and face recog can suck stinky goat balls, and as long as it is between you and the tools/materials it does not matter. Nothing in your background or people skills or opinions will make the materials and parts behave differently in your hands, you won’t be get marginalized to them. The steel scoffs on privileges or whatever and the lack of them, it will shower you with the same little stinging hot turnings whoever you are.

And neither will being anything save you from a bite of the saw blade. These things are color- and gender-blind. (That thing didn’t have finger guards or other covers? Calls for a design tweak.)

Over the years of trying I keep ending on the social fringe. Few to no deeper links regardless what I want. Hence no reason to care for social consequences; I did not start this way, I evolved to this over a string of failures.

Sorry, so sorry, if I sound irked when you advocate meddling with the last turf that remains to me.

When you talk politics/ideologies, you either speak into an echo chamber of the same opinions, and achieve nothing, or argue with those whom you won’t convince anyway, and achieve nothing. It’s way more fun to discuss how to do a thing; the right-or-wrong there can be answered experimentally, with The Physics as the final impartial arbiter.

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That might be one reason. The woman has to take some time off, but the difference in lost opportunities between 12 and 18 months is not so much, whereas the difference between 0 and 6 months could be quite a bit if the man decided to take some of the parental leave (and there may well be a working culture where the man is legally entitled to take parental leave, but if he does take that option… I’m really not sure, and I’m not denying that viewing the household as women’s work is a significant factor either.

As far as I’m concerned, if we had been allowed to take one year of parental leave to share out as we wished, we would probably have split it about 11.5 months/0.5 months. It’s good for me to be there at the start, but it’s not my body that needs to recover and it’s not me who has to spend a lot of the day breastfeeding the baby for the next year or so. If we had been given two years, I’d probably have taken 2-3 months off. If I had taken equal leave, we’d have had to find childcare after one year - I’m not sure if that would be optimal for a young child given the choice, and it could really add to costs and hassle without providing any great advantages. Now that our daugher is a couple of years old, I work from home and look after the kids while my wife is focusing more on her career.

I do think that this is an area where rational decisions are made that have a predictable and unequal effect. We’re not competing with each other and neither of our careers are our first priority, but we make decisions that we consider to be the most beneficial to everyone. With only one child, this probably wouldn’t have a huge effect in itself, but if we followed the same reasoning and had five children, there’s no way she could compete with men on an equal level in the workforce. I could take more time off to even the odds, but I would only do it if it was the best thing for the family, not so that I could take a hit for feminism.

There’s also the fact that men generally marry women who are a few years younger than them, and therefore often earn less. If one person has to temporarily put their job aside for the family, the rational short-term choice would generally be the one who already has to take time off to recover, who is also earning less and who often has more experience with domestic tasks and childcare due to already having taken essential time off. And so the trend goes on.

Sometimes this issue seems quite related to the main topic: often I get the idea that the language of equality is focused on a concept of individual success, where a higher salary and certain other markers are seen as being the benchmarks to aim for. Women are disadvantaged because they have to stay at home, look after the kids and do housework, while men are able to live the dream of spending all day at work in exchange for money. I think it is often the case that women are being held back, but I think we lose something if we make corporate goals the ideal. Many countries that allow more parental leave don’t actually end up with a statistically more equal society, but in my experience they do seem to have more cooperation by men in childcare and domestic work and more respect for these skills. I want women to be able to progress in their careers, find job satisfaction and earn high salaries, but I’d prefer to see a society where neither men nor women felt that they had to do this in order to live a good life.

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“Meddling?” you sound like a scooby doo villain now and it’s still an absurd exaggeration that taking into account thinking about others will disenfranchise you personally. This isn’t about you.

Failsafes fail, even the most air-tight design (in that case and in countless others). I only brought her up to bring this conversation back to my first comment and explain my investment in questioning something that isn’t design or engineering or physics (all things you’re bringing in), but is instead the imprecision of “making” and the movement associated with it.

But if this is about Physics for you, they’re mute and indifferent (rather than impartial) and they’re nothing without application, which is where humans come in, bringing with them neither muteness nor impartiality. That’s why the lobotomized autopilot function of “just make it” isn’t enough by itself.

It sounds like you’re right that I won’t convince you, but that isn’t a mark of honor.

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Tell me, with my hobbies including failures and accidents and crashes and fires and explosions of all kinds. That occasional fireball or shock wave is the cost of having nice things (and stupid managers and overly optimistic operators and lack of maintenance and corrosion and plugged pipes and stuck valves and leaky compressed air actuators and opening a manhole when the thing is still under pressure and walking into nitrogen-inerted tank and so on and on and on…).

…also, I studied at a school where missing fingers were rather common occurrence, which maybe desensitized me somewhat. Pro tip: stay away from organic peroxides, stay far away! Nitro compounds are safer.

Why does everything have to have a well-defined mission (and who gets to define it)? Can’t some things be left alone by the ideologues, to be left to just be as what they are, regardless how nebulous and vague, regardless how open to interpretation (or lack of) by the end users? The end users who want to read Make and not The Socially Appropriate Thinking?

That is Someone Else’s Problem, aka SEP.

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You’re so close to getting it. You’re right that it’s not about you.

My friend came out of a similar background to the one you’re describing and that mysteriously didn’t stop her from either thinking critically or consistently displaying generosity of spirit in consideration of others.

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I agree. Does that mean we can’t point out co-option? And again, the point of the article is that making has been elevated above other forms of work, precisely because of capitalism, and that there is a gendered aspect to that.

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Yeah but the only people that say this are generally white, heterosexual men who already have the privilege of ignoring any and all political subtexts because they’re on the top of the heap and it doesn’t matter to them (because of said privilege). Anyone who is a minority or otherwise not in this position doesn’t necessarily get to ignore it and (frankly) those people make up more of the human race.

I say this as a white, heterosexual male engineer too.

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