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Lils Dobber

Project lead Lils Dobber

Contact details

 Email:

Lils.C.Dobber@warwick.ac.uk

Postgraduate student studying MASc Community, Engagement, and Belonging at the University of Warwick.

Hand Made: Weaving together the relationships between crafts, crafting, and transness through the framework of a personal collection of artefacts.

I have a significant personal and academic interest in both transness and creativity and this dissertation is the culmination of not only my Master’s but also years of crafting and collecting all sorts of handmade items. I entwined personal anecdote and reflections with academic literature and findings, spinning a tale which explored the many ways in which crafting and transness have intersected through my life and beyond, anchored by discussions of specific items such as badges, ear cuffs, and my mastectomy pillow.

The “community” in the title of the Master’s can mean so many things; that is the beauty and challenge of it. My dissertation is an ode to my community; the people who have taught me how to become myself as well as how to make things I have used to survive and thrive.

Academic supervisor: Dr Kim Lockwood Clough and Dr Gavin Schwartz-Leeper

Project Goals

The goals for this project were rather more exploratory than I think is typical for a dissertation, particularly as I realised I was just as interested in the work as a creative project itself as opposed to purely drawing on secondary sources or conducting any primary research of my own.

I consider this diss to be composed of multiple strands in conversation with one another. The project emerged from a desire to explore a relationship between transness and craft that I had noticed within myself and amongst my friends and that I wanted to push to its limits and explore the full extent of. This lead to the project being a sort of braid of three parts: the crafts themselves, as well as the act of crafting, which in turn fed into my personal reflections, in the form of both prose and more adventurous forms of writing, which consequently led me down academic rabbit holes in an attempt to draw links between the experiences.

The whole dissertation is on some level an experiment in articulating a series of feelings and experiences, trying to make sense of a set of choices which consistently brought my transness in contact with crafts and hoping to make some connections which would help illustrate the value that trans people may find in crafting as well as advocating for craft and creativity as valuable and insightful parts of the research process.

I aimed to draw together theory which discussed a broad range of crafts, from knitting to zines, hoping to distil the key concepts and demonstrate their relevance across contexts. This fragmentary approach reflected the work of crafting itself and so felt in line with what I was trying to produce.

Project Outcomes

Transness and crafting are inextricably linked and my work is a testament of this as well as a theoretical argument for it. The trans body and trans self are created, painstakingly, through time and effort and love. We are the fruit of the will and hands of scores of people - our friends, our trans ancestors, the strangers on the internet who make tutorials about how best to look after yourself after surgery or how to try out a new name. I argue for a transness that is simultaneously natural and created, chosen repeatedly as we unravel untruths and make ourselves anew. Craft becomes a metaphor, a coping mechanism, and a necessity for us. I crafted this dissertation and some of the objects I discuss within it as an attempt to understand myself and how my transition has impacted me. The resilience and patience required to craft extends its use as a metaphor for transness and the DIY associations remind us that we will always find ways to share knowledge with each other and connect with each other and that there is delight to be had in the difficulty of doing so.

Future Research Aspirations

Since completing my Master’s I have stayed on at the university but now as a staff member in the form of a graduate scheme which will see me take three placements in different teams across two years. My first placement is in Warwick Institute of Engagement where my passion for exploring topics through creative and non-traditional methods is proving useful as I help to organise events which share academics’ research with the public in meaningful and engaging ways.

In the future I would love to return to this project and invite others to contribute, both through more formal academic formats such as interviews but also with their own crafted creations. I would be particularly excited to create a communal piece of art which responds to some of the questions I explored in my dissertation.