Hands on Politics

We live in fraught times, when it seems not only impossible but downright undesirable to position oneself above the fray of contemporary politics. It is for this reason that Julia Bryan-Wilson's latest book, Fray: Art + Textile Politics, could not have arrived at a better moment. At its heart, Fray is an examination of the sorts of political insights gained, quite literally, from setting your hands to work. More than a book about textiles, Fray is a varied survey of what it feels like to try one's hand at making another world possible—a critical project that focuses on a set of undeniably haptic works of art and material culture, aided by the author's personal commitment to continually "measure her own reach," as a critic.

Beyond the way textiles and their familiars (such as clothing, banners, soft goods, and quilts) serve to represent our personal identities, Bryan-Wilson challenges herself, and her readers, to consider the kinds of political entanglements that the situated work of making, handling, wearing, and caring for fabrics can activate. From the book's beginning (a close reading of a feminist T-Shirt handed down to the author from her mother), Bryan-Wilson works to carefully locate herself relative to her objects of study. It is not a move new to feminist theory, or even contemporary Art History, but Bryan-Wilson distinguishes her approach by meticulously attending to the textures of her varied encounters: noting which objects are at her fingertips and which ones resist her caress—which objects can/cannot be handled. Taking cues from Eve Sedgwick's powerfully haptic analyses in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003), Bryan-Wilson writes that "texture is a unique quality," it "invites two distinct temporal imaginings, as the viewer both considers the object's origin (looking back to its process of conception and the whole sweep of its physical existence) and projects forward to a future moment of speculative touch, fondling, interaction" (183). In accounting for the textures of her chosen objects, Bryan-Wilson consequently (and unabashedly) lets the reader in on what she's "feeling"—what she is and isn't able to sense, and what is at stake, politically, in this difference.

Fray differs from recent texts that profess to focus on the political power of "materiality," texts that lay claim on "the material turn" but refuse to acknowledge the potent capacities that actual material culture has in establishing key relays between abstracted, strategic expressions of power and more tactical, situated acts of critical resistance. Bryan-Wilson avoids this trap by employing a strategy that braids art historical methods of formal analysis together with rigorous archival research, and the political investments and frameworks offered by intersectional feminist and queer theory. Early on, Bryan-Wilson concludes an extended reading of the extravagantly decorated, yet modestly handmade costumes worn by the irreverent, "genderfucking" members of the 1970s San Francisco-based performance groups the Cockettes and the Angels of Light, with a reflection on "the fragmented, piecemeal nature of history, itself" (71). Here, the tatty, crocheted knickers worn by performers, such as Scrumbly Koldewyn, are not simply like the threads of time but serve as literal indexes of queer temporality and world-making.

If the book has a primary, defining logic, it is the author's interest in locating a series of tears within the social fabric. She learns whatever she can from the fray, from the edges of an artwork or the remnant of a shirt once worn by a disappeared loved one. Without making false equivalences between such categorically different objects, Bryan-Wilson explores the tensions that open up through their material similarities, and it is these tensions that organize each of the book's chapters.

After an introduction that locates Fray relative to other critical works on textiles found within Feminist Art History and Critical Craft and Material Cultural Studies, there are three main chapters. The first, "Queer Handmaking," explores how the reshaping and repurposing of traditionally gendered material practices (such as...