Podcasts
Alla Myzelev University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada.
This podcast is intended for educational use only.
Knitting, along with embroidery, crocheting, and other needlework had traditionally been considered an enjoyable, creative, and useful preoccupation. Women and some men created designs that helped to beautify places that they lived and kept them worm and comfortable in cold weather. In recent years, knitting has gone through an unprecedented revival and had become an appealing hobby for both men and women, young and hip as well as mature and conservative. My research looks at knitting as a cultural phenomenon that constitutes one of the many aspects of the material heritage of England and North America. Production of the handmade knitted objects had been encouraged throughout the middle of the twentieth century. Numerous publications construct knitting as not only worthwhile and altruistic pastime but also as a decadent, self-indulgent and subversive action. For example, Domiknitrix: Whip Your Knitting into Shape offers a bikini pattern as well as other edgy projects such as deepdécolleté tops and seductive hair and head pieces. Knitting had been tied to the ideas of love, piece amongst the nations, meditation, and rebelliousness against the previous generations. I would like to explore how images and text of the knitting literature use the narrative of women liberation, stereotypes (Stitch' N Bitch), gender constructions, and the binary opposition of masculinity vs. femininity (Knitting with Balls: a Hands-On Guide to Knitting for the Modern Man) to reshape audience's understanding of this craft.
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Les travaux d'aiguille, et particulièrement le tricot, connaissent un regain d'intéret majeur. L'auteure situe le tricot dans le contexte du patrimoine culturel anglais et nord-américain. Elle explore les idées et les valeurs traditionnelles rattachées au tricot, ainsi que les idées nouvelles véhiculées à ce sujet par la littérature contemporaine.