Queering the Subversive Stitch : Men and the Culture of Needlework
- Submitting institution
-
University of Ulster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 88357132
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Bloomsbury Publishing
- ISBN
- 9781472578051
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- April
- Year of publication
- 2021
- URL
-
https://ulster.sharepoint.com/:b:/s/REF2021/ESi5NuQBpGpEspB1b20L03kBC8294WH0UvthmPjUiwsDew?e=mnY56R
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- The published output will be available to the public on 8th April 2021 as a hard copy. Hard copies were received by the publisher on 22nd February 2021 and supplied to the Author before 22nd March 2021. However, the author manuscript was finalised by the publisher on 18th November 2020 and verified by the author on 24th November 2020. We include the digital copy of the published book, from the publisher, which includes a timestamp.
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
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D - Art, Conflict & Society
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This 70,000-word monograph is the first book to be published on men’s needlework (in any country and any language). It documents and interrogates textiles made by men in diverse historical periods (from the medieval to the modern) and locations (Europe, North and Latin America, Africa, Asia, Australia). As a substantial research project (2014-2020) it generates completely new ideas from previously overlooked archives and collections. Its originality necessitated a protracted period of wide archive research and image sourcing (there are almost 100 images in the book, many previously unpublished). It is acknowledged as a ‘major scholarly achievement’ and a landmark publication.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The history of men’s needlework has long been considered a taboo subject. This is the first book ever published to document and critically interrogate a range of needlework made by men. It reveals that since medieval times men have threaded their own needles, stitched and knitted, woven lace, handmade clothes, as well as other kinds of textiles, and generally delighted in the pleasures and possibilities offered by all sorts of needlework. Only since the dawn of the modern age, in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, did needlework become closely aligned with new ideologies of the feminine. Since then men’s needlework has been read not just as feminising but as queer.
In this groundbreaking study Joseph McBrinn argues that needlework by male artists as well as anonymous tailors, sailors, soldiers, convalescents, paupers, prisoners, hobbyists and a multitude of other men and boys deserves to be looked at again. Drawing on a wealth of examples of men’s needlework, as well as visual representations of the male needleworker, in museum collections, from artist’s papers and archives, in forgotten magazines and specialist publications, popular novels and children’s literature, and even in the history of photography, film and television, he surveys and analyses many of the instances in which “needlemen” have contested, resisted and subverted the constrictive ideals of modern masculinity.
This audacious, original, carefully researched and often amusing study, demonstrates the significance of needlework by men in understanding their feelings, agency, identity and history.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -