Leiden University Student Repository

Zijderveld, Holly (2025)

Knitted Binaries: The Embodiment of Craft and Code

Master thesis | Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (MSc)

Craft and technology are often discussed as polar opposites: whereas one represents tradition, skill, and the past, the other invokes disembodiment, modernity, and the future. This dichotomy is also enforced through gendered lines: crafting is often associated with women's domesticity, whereas technology and hacking are often considered a masculine pursuit. Despite this, current-day craftspeople often combine craft and technology in their practice. This ethnographic study looks into the All Yarns Are Beautiful community, centered around an open-source project developing a hack for vintage knitting machines. Combining ethnographic observation and interviews with autoethnographic practice, craft and technology are seen to be made of the same fabric through the processes of embodiment inherent to working with knitting machines. Their similarity brings the prescribed gender and identity binaries to a forefront, as they are no longer seen to fit.

Ethnography

autoethnography

gender

craft

technology

F/OSS

hacking

Author

Zijderveld, Holly

Faculty

Faculty of Social & Behavioural Sciences

Specialisation

Global Ethnography

Supervisors

Elsa Charlety

ECTS Credits

15

Language

en