February is officially LGBT+ History Month in the UK, an annual celebration of the diversity, history, achievements, and contributions of the LGBTQ+ community. This year’s theme is Activism and Social Change, highlighting the wide range of activities (from grassroots organising and protests to advocacy, collaboration and art) that LGBTQ+ people have engaged in to both advance society for everyone and to craft a community.
This concept of crafting an identity or community (as an essential process and strategy for living, loving, healing and care) is explored in the 2023 book Crafted With Pride: Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain, edited by artist, curator and researcher Daniel Fountain. The collection breaks new ground in looking at how British LGBTQ+ people since the 1980s have harnessed craft as a form of protest and storytelling, maintaining that expressions of solidarity and resistance “can be represented at the very level of visual and material culture; what we wear, what we create, and what we carry with us to help us navigate an increasingly hostile world”.
Encompassing handmade clothing, protest banners, radical self-published zines and more, the book draws together case studies that focus on fashioning the self, pride and preservation, collaborative craft and contemporary practices. Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, the Museum of Transology, Lesbians and Gay Men Support the Miners (LGSM), the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt, Queer Zine Library, and many other histories, stories and objects are discussed, shedding light on the important connections between craft, queerness and activism.
Crafts such as textiles have often been positioned as passive or domestic pursuits, unsuited to active or public activities, resulting in their value as an activist tool being underestimated. This is a point Eleanor Medhurst picks up on in her analysis of garments such as t-shirts (many housed in the collection of Glasgow Women’s Library), badges and knitwear that have been hand-crafted and customized by lesbian activists in Britain: “Forms of craft, things that are handmade (often for practical use), have always been devalued when it comes to the skill and intent put into them. The hierarchy of art over craft is rooted in class and gender, where anything made by a working-class person or a woman is intrinsically lesser.” In this context, she argues, “to use craft in lesbian activism is to imagine the possibilities of life outside of all forms of hierarchy. It is a tool for lesbian creation and reinvention. It exists in the physical labour of printing ink onto fabric or weaving yarn into shape, but it also exists in the possibilities that this process offers.”
Craft, then, as a shared, informal, accessible language, is about “care, purpose and intent”. We are invited to think about craft as activism, “rather than as an expression of activist ideas”, and to appreciate its central part in queer life in the everyday. Maybe in this way, as LGBT+ History Month encourages us, we can all drive positive social and political change.
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