Making Feminisms: An Experiment in Experimentation

By Morgan Legal, Sybil Willoughby, and Gurkirt Rai

GSWS 321 “Making Feminisms” is a course that explores DIY practices through a feminist lens, engaging concepts from feminist science and technology studies (FSTS). It is a wild ride through dense theoretical discussions, origami, crochet and more. Through open-ended assignments we thought with particular making practices and projects in creative experimentation. Each class invited us to think deeply about the practices that make everything (including yarn, computers, and corn). We used a variety of methods to inquire about the material, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of things and the practices that make them.

FSTS is central to the theoretical toolbox used to think with DIY practices in “Making Feminisms.” It is an interdisciplinary “non-discipline” open to a multiplicity of perspectives. FSTS embraces complexity, difference, and change through practices like “implosion” which encourage you to pick apart the vast network of relations (be them human or otherwise) embedded in the most unassuming objects, like a ball of yarn. With concepts like “non-innocence,” FSTS is deeply committed to the intersection of materials, politics, and aesthetics. It rejects notions of objectivity that don't see science as a collection of situated practices. By paying attention to practices, FSTS asks what things do rather than what things are. These methods immerse participants into the many everyday worlds that we walk through without noticing—worlds of creative practice, scientific research, and the minutiae of everyday life.

The “Making Feminisms” classroom asks students to participate in novel ways. We often came to class expecting something completely different than what we were met with. Each class there are new exercises: crocheting, origami, board game-making, “implosions,” and more. Even the physical configuration of chairs and tables in the class were subject to experimentation. The instructor would have us weigh in on what we thought best for a particular activity. Then, we would move the furniture together. The course culminated in a modified “studio day,” making for an especially lively last day and encouraging us to learn not just from the instructor but from each other as well. Hands-on experimentation, student connection, and enthusiasm made this class special.

The mid-term assignment asked, “How does the process of making instructions give insight on how knowledges are crafted, archived, shared, interpreted, or misunderstood?” Students reflected on how sex, gender, and race show up in making practices—and how steps and materials might be “hacked” for accessibility. Gendersploit, Communication student Morgan Legal’s digital making project, intermixes the practices of hackers and trans people, exploring the ways that trans people use the internet as a tool for sharing tricks and hacks often needed to interface with medico-legal institutions during transition.

By-Places, a collaborative DIY zine by Sociology and Anthropology student Sybil Willoughby and Morgan Legal made for the final “Making Feminisms” assignment, is part of a larger project exploring the practices and co-composition of small out of the way places in the city with a focus on affect and impersonal collectivity.

Reflecting on feminist politics of knowledge transmission and the question “What does it have to do with nonhumans?,” Bachelor of General Studies in Education student Gurkirt Rai writes,