The Craftastics: Agents for Social Change
by Jenny Western
The other day a casual conversation between me and my mom quickly escalated into a heated impasse. We were talking about feminism, and after the dust settled it occurred to me that one’s grasp of this topic can be highly mediated by the respective generational lens through which it is being viewed. As a new mother myself, I have fantasized about dressing my infant daughter in a “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” onesie, but I pause to wonder: What will my daughter think a feminist is supposed to look like, act out and believe in, once she is old enough to apply the parameters of her generation’s take on this fluid topic?
A recent project initiated by the Valley Gardens Middle School Grrlz Club—working with artistJennie O and funded by the Winnipeg Arts Council’s WITH ART Community Program—offers a glimpse into how some young women from the generation born around the turn of the 21st century are approaching feminist issues today. The Craftastics: Agents for Social Change is a deck of trading cards that grew out of a weekly meeting of girls in grades 7, 8 and 9 who came together to discuss a range of teenage issues from depression to peer pressure. Once Jennie O joined up with the group to work on a public art project, the Grrlz decided to become superheroes who would face these challenges head on. Dolls were made, costumes were sewn, a photo shoot occurred and a set of fourteen original characters were created. Some of the heroes, like Punk Cat, Starry Day and The Golden Defender, demonstrate just how creative the young women got with the project, while Shapesista, Straight Shooter and Positive Penny highlight thesocial issues being targeted.
The real brilliance of The Craftastics project, however, is that, while common goals are shared by participants, the approach to content remained open to individual interpretation. For example, the characters of The Bookmark and The Blondies couldn’t be more different at first glance. One is a cloaked figure in a long brown skirt promoting literary pursuits, while the other two are fair-haired debs in black mini-dresses eschewing the stereotype of the dumb blonde. Yet in the end, the stats listed on the back of their respective trading cards reveal a similar promotion of intelligence as a sought-after quality for young women, no matter what their outward appearance to the world.
The fact that intelligence in the form of independent and critical thought is at the foundation of this project is crucial. Not only were the participants encouraged to envision themselves as empowered ladies capable of raising their voices against injustice, they were also enabled to define their own identities for themselves within this matrix. Using craft and artistic mediums to investigate these issues further underscores the project’s attention to female-determined freedoms. These young women were not consuming an image of femininity derived from popular media but rather creating an original image from their own imaginations and with their own hands. Armed with the tools fostered through the Craftastics project, the participants of theValley Gardens Middle School Grrlz Club can continue to explore the tenets of feminism with the knowledge that there may be many different ways of looking at it, even within their peer group.
For me, the most intriguing superhero of the whole Craftastics crew is Baby Blank Slate, thesidekick of Jennie O’s alter ego, The Matriart. She is in actuality Jennie O’s daughter, born during the time that the Craftastics project was taking place. Baby Blank Slate is, as her namesuggests, a person whose ideas of womanhood are yet to play out. Her possibilities as a woman are boundless, but she is already considered a team member in a supportive and thoughtful community of women where creative thought is prized above all. An ideological infrastructure of this kind can not only enact social change, but it could even transcend the potential miscommunication minefield of the so-called generation gap.
Jenny Western is a curator, writer and educator based out of Winnipeg, Manitoba.