The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home… It’s not, of course, that there’s anything wrong with making (although it’s not all that clear that the world needs more stuff). The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing—it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker—regardless of what one actually or mostly does—is a way of accruing to oneself the gendered, capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.
Debbie Chachra, “Why I Am Not a Maker”
This is a controversial passage from a controversial essay. The last line in particular is a bit of an eyebrow-raiser, probably because of its risky buzzwords (“gendered”, “capitalist”), which Chachra freely applies to something as seemingly innocuous as making things. Frankly, there were a few moments in the paper when Chachra’s arguments lost me, or when I became a little confused (e.g. about where Chachra sees education relative to ‘making’ — at one point she compares it to coding children, which alone seems like an insane thing to say, and then she later seems to cast that aside completely and file education under ‘nurturing,’ which also seems like an oversimplification. Maybe she’s just arguing that education is commonly perceived as a nurturing profession when we should acknowledge its similarities to maker-professions, but isn’t she trying to destabilize the emphasis on making in the first place? Why should she have to validate educators by comparing them, unconvincingly, to entrepreneurs and software engineers? I had questions).
Despite those parts of it, however, I am pretty on board with Chachra’s core argument — at the very least, I can say that it resonates with me. If we do take Rand’s idea of “making” as “inventing,” in a strict sense; ie. making something wholly new, then I don’t think I’m a maker either. The extent to which I care about “shaking things up” is super limited — I just want to live a good life. I wonder if there’s a distinction that Chachra didn’t mention between “creating” and “inventing” within the umbrella of “making”; I’ve always thought of myself as someone who is pretty creative while being the furthest thing from inventive, if that makes sense, and those words really do fall along gendered lines (although they do so differently from different historical perspectives). Women can be “creative,” even in our most distant history, in the sense that they bear and raise children, weave at the loom, that sort of thing. In our current context, I’d say that woman artists, poets, cooks, and other “creative types” are pretty commonly accepted. Much less so are woman “inventors” — there are your makers that Chachra seems to focus on; the STEM bros, Silicon Valley people, Elon Musks, etc. Of course, there isn’t a majority of people around anymore who will tell you that women can’t or shouldn’t invent things, but I think most of us can agree that those fields tend to be composed of more men than women, and that it’s harder for women to become established in them. So, being myself a small-minded woman, I can’t code at all, and I suck at a lot of manual tasks, and I have zero entrepreneurial drive — but I write poetry, and I bake cakes, and that’s not considered making stuff? I guess I have to develop a new recipe and see if that changes anything.
I really like text, and a lot of the work I’ve done in college has centered around literary analysis. I’ve used some tools that I think were created from some DH initiative or other in my classes and personal research with great success, so I’m interested in developing projects like those, since I know for a fact that they’re useful! There’s a site I’ve used for corpus analysis (I think that’s the right term) of Shakespeare that’s really handy; it searches for every instance of a word in all of his works and shows you the word in context with its citation. I haven’t been able to find the link, but it’s great, even though it sounds relatively simple to make. I’m also a big fan of Dickinson College Commentaries like this one, which I think are considered “digital editions.” I want to appreciate DH tools for their own inherent value, of course, but it would be particularly valuable to me if I could become proficient in ones that could expedite the processes that I already use a lot, or that could provide me with quantitative data that I can use in literary analyses.
