Building and Weaving

[ysabetwordsmith]

ithiliana pointed me to this eloquent essay about metaphors of theory in academic writing.  The prevalence of building reflects a masculine perspective.  The addition of fibercrafts restores the feminine.

But genderfreak that I am, I immediately thought of cob building, which is done with clay, and a more quintessentially feminine medium would be difficult to find.  Fresh clay is slick and wet and red.  When fired, clay becomes strong, and fireproof, and lasts practically forever.  Even sun-dried clay is very tough stuff.  The nature of cob encourages curved, flowing lines rather than straight edges.

Comments

[mdlbear]

THE MUD - The MUD site for earthbag building and sustainable living.

Cool!

[ysabetwordsmith]

Thanks for sharing.

Re: Cool!

[mdlbear]

You're welcome. Found it while looking into tiny houses.

[technoshaman]

But genderfreak that I am

I love that you can do do just throw that out there.....

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I just be myself and let other people wonder what to go do about it. :D

[tomtac.livejournal.com]

Well, I accept that those connotations are there. I don't claim to like it, though.

To me, the main difference between building and fabrics is of "permanence". Some monuments have been around thousands of years. Tapestries that are almost a thousand years old tend to have faded, and my regular clothes fall apart too soon.

"Cob" is somewhere in the middle; pots, to me, either last forever or break.

(The miraculous cloak in Guadelupe is made of cactus fiber, and should have disintegrated completely in 25 years. The fact that it hasn't aged in 500 years is considered a demonstration of its divine origin.)

But please, consider the above simply a tangent. I get more pleasure out of pointing you to a magnificent part of computer programming, a field pretty much created by an academic named Donald Knuth. Literate Programming. Writing a computer's program as if it was mostly a human book. A long explanation of the program in English, with "chunks" stuck in among the English that are written in a computer language.

The original program to churn all the chunks together in a horrible mess that the computer likes? It was called "Tangle" and the action is now called "tangling". A fabric or string term, but it is mostly related to "sphagetti code", a "kitchen term" which you might think is feminine.

And ... the original program to take the collection of text and chunks and turn it into a beautiful book or journal article? It was called "Weave", and the action is still called "weaving".

In terms of gender identity, you might chalk this up to his being a California academic and being progressive.

In terms of "building" and "permanence" ... well, it fits the article's ideas of pulling the parts together into a whole tapestry; some programs really have that feel. (I pull old style Fortran pieces to interact with a rather new Python version and old it together with pieces of "script".)

But the "permanence" thing is different. Pieces of software have to be amazingly worthwhile indeed to last a long time, or they get replaced, at least in "production environments".

But, as I said at the top of this, I agree with most of the article's observations.

God's Blessings.