Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. While the shift might be from the corporate to the individual (supported, mind, by a different set of companies selling a different set of things), it mostly re-inscribes familiar values, in slightly different form: that artifacts are important, and people are not.
Debbie Chachra. “Why I Am Not a Maker,” from The Atlantic (Jan 23, 2015).
This passage in particular from Debbie Chachra’s article caught my attention. As someone who comes from queer, artistic spaces, a “maker” is usually someone who hand-creates something (be it pottery, food, a mixtape, or traditional art) to share it with their community in the form of gifts or locally organized markets. This quote made me realize that 1) yes, markership does now have the connotation of a person physically creating something, and placing overt value on it erases the hard work done by those that teach and support makers; that 2) makership, which was a term I once heard primarily in small community and affinity groups, has become so hyper-capitalized that it has become a badge of honor; if you are not a maker, then you are nothing; and that 3) queer people know that makership cannot exist without nonmakership, and that while we take pride in being makers, we know that it’s not a be all, end all identity feature. I hope that larger society will realize something that queer communities have known for a long time: that making is a way of giving to your community, and so is non-making.
1 thought on “Reflection”
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I agree that non-making is also a way of giving to your community. In fact, one could argue that educating, analyzing, and discussing are the prerequisite for “making”, so in a sense the former is more important than the latter. Most-if not all-makers get their ideas from reading or listening to the non-makers talking about the object of interest or something related to it. Educators are in a sense popularizers of ideas, so we need them in order to make tangible things that we can sell.