PIECE/PEACE WORK: Engendering ‘rationalities of care’ through a thread-by-thread deconstruction of militarism

Abstract

Textiles and their manufacture from raw material into cloth, uniforms, bedding and shelter are an integral component of the military-industrial-complex as are the mechanized gestures of industrialization through which they are produced. How do the rationalities of transnational industrial production intersect with those of militarism? How are both informed by dominant orderings of masculinities and femininities produced by and through centuries of Imperialist and economic expansionism? “Piece/Peace Work” juxtaposes an auto-ethnographic reflection of Unravel — a durational memorial performance meditation involving the thread-by-thread deconstruction of military uniforms — with historical and theoretical inquiries into the gendered lexicons of war, peace and textile production. Drawing on theories of mourning in a geopolitical context (Butler 2010); a ‘critical craft theory’ that rethinks crafting as a ‘tactic of ambiguity’ (Roberts 2011); and performance theory that examines performance as ‘a tool for cross- or intra-temporal negotiation’ (Schneider 2011: 30-31) ‘Piece/Peace Work’ investigates how through the tactile corporality of the task of dismantling the uniform, thread's past inter(in)animates the tangle of thread in the political present to reveal the assemblage of materials and material relations and conditions that must collaborate to create the uniform.