An odd day of drinking coffee, talking about knitting, baby clothes, and gender...this won't go where you think it's going.

Last weekend I attended the Interweave Knits Knitting Lab in Manchester, NH. I'd signed up to learn all there is to know about  double-knitting from Alasdair Post-Quinn; I learned but did not master. The people at these kinds of events are generally smart women who fall into 2 categories: those that know they're smart and take pride in their knitting, and those who deny that they're smart and take pride in going away for knitting weekends where they can talk endlessly about their kids and in-laws while buying up expensive yarn and acting helpless in class.  Let's hear it for those who know they're intelligent! Anyway...Alasdair is so intelligent he's a little scary but, good for me, he has a sculpture degree and wasn't hard to talk to. His sample projects were fairly complex. Of the three classes, I succeeded in making one complete sample (a little intro flower.)  

One modified sample gave me a bunch of great ideas (2-sided, it should have been a letter form in which the letters appear correctly on both sides, but I had to quit my letter and use instead a slash):

and one absolute failure ("off the grid") will figure prominently later in the story I tell here:

Upon my return, I had unfinished business with my newest art collaborator, Dr. Daniel Meinhardt, of our Human Biology department. Dr. Meinhardt studies gender and sex from the biologist's perspective, and he'd been doing some photography exploring gender construct. After he'd had a little exhibition, and had gotten good reviews from my art students enrolled in his Art and Science seminar course, we began to talk about textiles, gender construct, sex-workers, street signs, the definition of the word "girls" in different contexts, his hopes and dreams for his daughter, and all manner of things related to both our areas of research. Did I mention, he's also a member of the Women's and Gender Studies faculty? Anyway...Dan and I had a meeting planned for the day after I got back, but in the meantime, while in New Hampshire I'd been getting email from him with fascinating stuff, like a picture of the Prader scale.

So armed with the Prader scale, a Dharma Trading Company catalog and a big cup of coffee, I met with Dan. He's reading a book now on trans-sex experience and was horrified by the medical community's attitudes towards sex and gender. Anyway, what this boiled down to was the idea that it's no one's fucking business what you have between your legs, and even a common as dirt question like, "Is your baby a boy or a girl?" is really incredibly rude - not because we should be able to tell by looking, but because what you're really asking is, what does your child's most intimate body part - the part that's supposed to be private, and is even called 'the privates' - look like?  Of course, there's art in there. It's art we can make people think with, unless they are too busy throwing up. The great thing about working with Dan is, he has good charts, can take good pictures, and he's also a good draughtsman with the scientific drawings.

Me, I can dye things and am good at image transfers on fabric. So far, it's been a fairly seamless collaborative situation, if only he'd stop having quite so many good ideas.

Leaving Dan, I went and had another cup of coffee with an artist this time, my new friend Rob Mertens. I'd been thinking about Rob at Knitting Lab because he had indicated a history of struggle with weaving guilds (similar women in weaving guilds as at knitting conferences), he claims not to like to knit (though he knits) and in general, because he's pretty much the only other person in town who's ever taught a textiles course (okay, there's one in Neenah, but no one reminds me of home like Rob does). I can talk to him with that kind of short-hand similarly trained people can. It's very nice, as a professional educator, to talk to people you don't have to explain things to from the beginning, once in a while. With Rob I can usually start 2/3 of the way down a path and he gets it. He comments on the overlapping of my thought processes but it's not a Venn Diagram that exists in conversations I have with too many others, simply because my subject circles aren't shared very widely. Here's a diagram with Rob in it:

On this day, for example, I was still thinking heavily about what Dan had told me about a condition found primarily in the Dominican Republic, where at puberty, people spontaneously masculinize. That is to say, you may think you're a female, and then one day your hormones kick in and surprise! you were a dude all along. The translation used in medical journals is actually quite rude, but roughly it's "eggs at twelve," eggs in this case being what we'd call instead nuts, and twelve referring to the age of the person who suddenly finds this happening. For this reason, in some places, girls are not given gender specific names...just in case Sally is actually Steve when puberty hits.

So Rob, probably expecting to dive right into knitting conversation, instead had to look at the Prader scale and then sit and talk about genitalia in the Dominican Republic with me for the better part of an hour. Fortunately, as a straight man with an MFA in textiles he can talk gender construct and body politics as well as anyone - perhaps better. (And the man with the infant of indeterminate sex had not yet seated himself within earshot of our conversation, blessedly. I mean, even that was weird.) Eventually, though, we got to the knitting.

I was showing my charts and graphs and such...and had gotten to the two-sided thing I couldn't do until I simplified my pattern from a 13 stitch letter 'a' to a 6 stitch '/' when Rob pointed out that this would be the way to make work about the sex dichotomy.

Um...crap. It was right there. But also...the chart I'd failed was in my bag. Alarmingly present in my bag was this image:

At first it was so related it was confusing. "Wait," Rob said, "This was the chart provided?" Yep. That was the chart provided. Vesica piscis, the yoni, or maybe a cigar is just a cigar - but that was the chart provided to knit a sample of increases and decreases with color changes on a double-knitted textile. I'm a little jittery now.