DIY

crafted hat rack with painted book bindings and attached objects — Carlynn Crosby, Women’s Writing Hat Rack

Today I wrapped my graduate seminar Women’s Writing & Pedagogy with a reveal of students’ Domestic Arts Assemblage projects, crafted from discarded items at our community’s creative reuse center, The Repurpose Project. This is a debut DIY assignment I designed specifically for this course, which combines a seminar on 20th/21st century women’s literature with a practical workshop on assignment mock-ups students design for courses they might teach in future.

Over the past 3.5 months we’ve read women’s writing in various forms: novels, experimental prose, poems, and image-texts. Our writers/makers: Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Carter, Alison Bechdel, Rita Dove, Margaret Atwood, and Ange Mlinko. We also explored our library’s archive of Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Literature and Art. Keyed to this range of women’s literary writing in English, the series of assignment mock-ups focused on: City, Domesticity, Literary Magazine, Myth. Students also did other short assignments, including a conference paper proposal about teaching and a draft syllabus that featured women’s writing.

The Domestic Arts Assemblage is the outlier assignment. My rules were loose, resourceful, and communal:

plastic bottle with crinkled sheets green paper and pages of writing — Zuzu Tadeushuk, Writer’s Block 2024

(1) Make a Domestic Arts Assemblage with items from The Repurpose Project. MB will give you $8.00 to use for your project. At least one of our syllabus texts or a mock-up assignment should be a source of inspiration.
(2) Submit a photo of your Domestic Arts Assemblage + a 250-300 word Maker Statement.

By doing a creative-critical assignment, students could curate syllabus materials alongside everyday objects to reflect on our semester’s discussions and generate ideas for future work.

The resulting assemblages were stunning, as you can see from the writing-themed examples I’m sharing here (with students’ permission). Viewing the projects as a gallery and discussing them with their makers in today’s class, I was struck by how they reassembled our syllabus and discussions in analytical and inventive fashion. This teacher became the student, learning new pedagogies. Here are some of my takeaways:

Women’s writing can be laden with everyday objects, bringing texture and heft to the words.
Domestic Arts Assemblage makes us question why we label some work as domestic, and some work as art.
The domesticity in women’s writing covers some things while revealing others.
In women’s writing, the women characters can succumb to and liberate themselves from the cycles of time.
In women’s writing, domestic objects can signify burdens and rebirth, fragmentation and integration, restriction and possibility.
The household objects we donate or otherwise discard are inanimate narrators of our everyday lives. – MB

Wall clock surrounded by a collage of objects — Hyunjung Kim, Fragmented Writing in Domestic Time

Student DIY project: punk t-shirt — Caged Heart, by Roy Udeh-Ubaka.
materials: black t-shirt, nails, safety pins, corks, zippers, rainbow pin, glue

I’m wrapping my PostPunk Cultures courses on the British 1980s this week. And I’m wrapping my head around

student DIY project for punk earrings — Anti-Domesticated Earrings, by Chandler Mordecai.
materials: metal hoop earrings, bread clips, keys, dog tag, measuring cup, buttons, bulldog clip, thread spool, sewing thread, zipper, safety pin, hairpin, can tab

the amazing work my students did for their DIY craft projects. Our syllabus sampled fiction, poetry, film, TV, and popular music. We also read cultural analyses of subcultural style, song lyrics, historical revivalism, Black Britishness, and queerness. We watched The Slits smash a car in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, and we watched Vyvyan smash all manner of things in The Young Ones. We parsed the disconsolate punk in Michael Hofmann’s poem “Body Heat,” considered the object relations in Julian Barnes’s Metroland, plumbed the depths of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Bass Culture,” felt the frisson of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber stories. We also attended the 20th anniversary of The FEST, Gainesville’s punk and underground music weekend.

DIY punk shoulder pads with nails — Don’t Lean on Me Shoulder Pads, by Vix Gutierrez.
materials: vintage shoulder pads, nails, ribbons, glue.

To link the course directly to the music festival and to punk’s DIY aesthetic, I designed an assignment in which students made body art they could wear to FEST 20. I wanted the DIY project to tap the bricolage aspect of punk that Dick Hebdige discusses. He notes how “the appropriated objects reassembled” by punk and other subcultural bricoleurs could turn everyday items into symbolic warfare. Punks transformed the domestic diaper pin into edgy facial fashion. One of my students sutured a ripped t-shirt with safety pins, repairing identities torn asunder by mainstream culture.

A student-turned-bricoleur deconstructed domesticity by freighting earrings with tiny household items that reflected traditional “women’s work.” Turning women’s shoulder pads inside-out, another student punked an 80s symbol of hard, corporate femininity into spiked outer-wear that would repel shoulder sobbers. Punk frontwoman Poly Styrene made a plastic bag into a musical rebuke to consumer culture. In parallel fashion, a student assembled an outer “anti-bra” from corporate lanyard ribbons.

student DIY project for a punk outer bra — The Anti-Bra, by Kayla Conde.
materials: corporate lanyards, keychains, playing cards, pin, VIP pass.

Since the punk’s battle cry was “No future!”–and climate change has us worried about our planet’s future–I wanted to build sustainability into my DIY assignment. And so I partnered with The Repurpose Project, a creative reuse center that diverts trash from local landfills. After consulting with Repurpose staff about a price point that would give students a fairly wide choice of materials, I gave each student $7.00 to purchase items for their body art. (This was my creative way of donating to Repurpose this semester.)

Repurpose staff also suggested that I give students an additional constraint: requiring at least 2 items from the Candy Shoppe section, which displays “trash-treasure” items that usually end up in the landfill. Many of these items are plastic. My assignment allowed students the option of combining Repurpose items with materials they already had on hand. For example, they might ‘punkify’ a vest, or a glove, or pair of shoes. After assembling their body art, students submitted photos + a 250-350 word Maker Statement. Some students chose to wear their body art to FEST 20.

In our informal feedback session in class, students found my DIY Body Art assignment as much of an outlier as I did. This is not the kind of thing students expect to do in an English Department class. They enjoyed making something with their hands instead of on their screens for a change. My students agreed that doing punk gave them a fuller sense of the texts we were studying. The project also got them out into our community, and it got them thinking about repurposing as a way to reduce waste. Some found that the DIY project brought a material sense to their writing process that was proving useful. These projects helped me to see how punk can be a sustainable and resourceful practice that we can take into our classrooms–and into our future. – MB

Containers full of small discarded items at The Repurpose Project — Assorted items at the Repurpose Project’s Candy Shoppe section, which rescues “trash-treasures” that usually end up in landfills.

(Re)sources:
All student work published by permission.
Kayla Conde, The Anti-Bra. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Chandler Mordecai, Anti-Domesticated Earrings. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Vix Gutierrez. Don’t Lean on Me Shoulder Pads. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. (1979. Routledge, 1987).
Roy Udeh-Ubaka, Caged Heart. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.

Marsha Bryant

Department of English

Women’s Writing as Domestic Arts Assemblage

Punk DIY as Sustainable Pedagogy