Crafting the queer citational turn

It’s a crisp summer morning, and I’ve just made the half hour walk from Sommerville, Massachusetts, to Harvard University. The grounds are majestic, as you’d expect, but everything is fragmented by iron fence railings (gates all locked or staffed by security) and garish white tents that have been installed for graduation festivities. I show my ID and make my way into the Houghton Library reading room where I’ll continue my research on craftwork for a project on queer modernist materialities. As a fan of the show Dickinson, which aired on Apple TV+ for three seasons from 2019-2021, I’ve asked to see the scrapbook set designer Marina Parker made for the archive. I’m fascinated by contemporary adaptations of literary pasts, and Parker’s scrapbook suggests how craft itself might be fundamental to those queer reworkings. 

As I carefully flip through the scrapbook’s pages, I’m struck by the care Parker has taken in assembling a material record of the show, which pays particular attention to Emily Dickinson’s queerness and the cultural and literary pasts of American activism. Wallpaper swatches are pasted in alongside sources of flooring inspiration, such as the checkered black and white floor she discovered while on a meditation retreat held in an old Massachusetts mansion. Correspondence with some of the oldest continually operating artisan design businesses (like lacemakers and carpet weavers) intwine with Parker’s record of her research rabbit holes. These imbricated textual and material records form a kind of citational archive—in recording her sources, Parker shows in very real terms how the work of a single set designer depends on a network of collaborators.

One particularly unique set of citations emerges in the various “shout outs” Parker records in the scrapbook. For example, on one page she writes about the task of curating the artworks in Dickinson’s brother and sister-in-law’s house, The Evergreens. She names the Assistant Set Decorator, acknowledges her specific contributions, and writes, “SHE DID A FANTASTIC JOB!” 

In an email (my gratitude to curator Christine Jacobson for connecting us), I asked Parker to reflect on the place of these notably enthusiastic scrapbook citations. In her reply, she described her difficulty finding a place in the film industry earlier in her career and moving towards collaboration as a core principle: 

The path to creative satisfaction seemed to be to seek as much creative control as possible. The reality though, is—the pace, breadth, & scope of film work, makes it unrealistic and impossible to truly work alone. And inspiration is often nurtured by exchange. In subsequent years I’ve slowly discovered / am discovering a community of people whose inspired ideas & work ethic I admire. Collaborating with talented, generous, delightful people has become one of my favorite parts of working in film; I now consider collaboration a real gift. I very much want to lift up, acknowledge, and appreciate the many hands and hearts behind the work.  

This scrapbook, in addition to Parker’s ethical and artistic commitments to generous citation, align with larger trends in feminist and queer scholarship. In more particular terms, this approach to not just acknowledging—but actively celebrating—a collaborative process takes its cues from the history of craft. While writing Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present, I also aspired to represent the “many hands and hearts” that contributed both practically and intellectually to what is ultimately a single-author monograph.

Sara Ahmed has described her own citation practices (not citing any white men in Living a Feminist Life, for example) as a way of building new structures for belonging. She suggests that, “Citation is feminist memory,” a way to craft community when departure seems like a necessary path. The theorist becomes a craftsperson as “Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings. My citation policy has affected the kind of house I have built.” Ahmed describes the intellectual work of feminist writing as deeply predicated on her own willingness to be vulnerable and to respond reciprocally in encounters with readers or audiences of various kinds. In that way, she changes the materials of her craft to capture this dynamic of exposure: “Perhaps citations are feminist straw: lighter materials that, when put together, still create a shelter but a shelter that leaves you more vulnerable.” The house of scholarship, therefore, seems made of bricks—and other times, straw strikes Ahmed as the more appropriate material. 

The artisanal properties of citation emerge in Susan Howe’s work on archives as a kind of serendipitous encounter with craft. She describes the processes by which “Often by chance, via out-of-the-way-card catalogues, or through previous web surfing, a particular ‘deep’ text, or a simple object (bobbin, sampler, scrap of lace) reveals itself here at the surface of the visible, by mystic documentary telepathy.” To illustrate the dynamic interplay of this telepathy, Howe engages in rigorous citation across texts and archives, both public-facing and personal. In one section, Howe quotes Stein’s invocation to “Think in stitches,” prompting the reader to understand the queer encounter at play in the archive, mediated by craft: “In looking up from her embroidery she looks at me.” Instead of bricks or straw, textile knots become her source material for crafting a creative-critical text such as Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives. She writes: 

Quotations are skeins or collected knots. “KNOT, (n., not…) The complication of threads made by knitting; a tie, union of cords by interweaving; as, a knot difficult to be untied.” Quotations are lines or passages taken at hazard from piled up cultural treasures. A quotation, cut, or closely teased out as if with a needle, can interrupt the continuous flow of a poem, a tapestry, a picture, an essay; or a piece of writing like this one. “STITCH, n. A single pass of a needle in sewing.” 

Howe’s vision of the quotation-as-knot both interrupts the flow of an essay or poem while also holding it together—like a binding. (Here I must admit to checking the Index of my book for my own reference to Virginia Woolf’s “heaped up things” in The Years, which in a footnote I describe as “a temporal phenomenon and a record of trauma recall[ing] Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History […] in which ‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage.’ It reminds me of Howe’s “piled up cultural treasures”…This line of quotations, or knots, extends between disparate texts, connecting them—stitching these references in a row.)

Multimedia scholars such as Storm Greenwood are crafting the queer citational turn quite literally through the project of “Devotional Citation,” a praxis Greenwood started in 2017 at the “intersection of visual art and decolonial feminist scholarship.” “Devotional Citation” is predicated on a praise framework that is reciprocal and resists the “commodification of study.” Many of Greenwood’s Citations are circulated in a gift economy of stitched quotations that are given back to the author, their words transformed into a new textual artwork. As the recipient of a Devotional Citation that quotes Crafting Feminism, I am struck by the ways in which quotes are remade through contact with Greenwood’s craftwork. Not only are the pieces illuminated—as in, illustrated and decorated with gold metallic pigment—they are illuminating; this citational practice reveals new dimensions of writing on craft through the very stitched nature of each word. 

Scholars are increasingly thinking about the shape their work takes, with citation as a collaborative process that can be made visible or even ritualized—such as the authors of “Feminist Citational Praxis and Problems of Practice” who describe the process of co-authoring a dissertation and engaging in citation practices, or rituals, that “provide an opportunity to ‘flip the scrip’ on CisHeteroPatriarchy.” Or on the topic of “Collabowriting,” Suzanne Churchill and Adam McKible argue that, scholarship is “collaborative in nature: the term ‘monograph’ actually belies the exchange of ideas that occurred through print and over time to produces the work. Collaboration animates and personalizes the scholarly exchange.” Or, one final example: I was recently delighted to see that Danielle Taschereau Mamers had taken visual notes of my exchange with a group of graduate students at the University of Toronto (thank you to Claire Battershill for this joyful invitation). In these notes, Mamers cites me as the speaker but also interweaves her own perspective on the conversation and represents the students’ various questions and prompts, too. The topic of craft and scholarship is enlarged by the visual-verbal patchwork. 

Writing a book is a process of encounter between voices and ideas throughout history—and our citational rituals form a thread, stitching the project together as a crafted object. As those conversations become more intentionally oriented towards variously inclusive methods, craft’s tactile, transhistoric metaphors and practices will form an important stitch in the future of scholarship.

_{Featured image by Mel Poole via Unsplash.}