Playing Slow

Abstract

This paper investigates processes that include weaving, macramé, and needlework. The very nature of these practices requires devoted physical presence, firmly fixed for long hours to build rhythm. Labourious and tedious, these crafts bring one to the present by means of minute and constrained gestures. Enduring the process at hand, the psyche is anxious and persistently appre-hensive. Despite this, the work is undertaken with pleasure, entangling the practitioner such that she is unable to depart the site of labour. Touch and the repetitive working and reworking of materials allow for pleasure, enjoyment and being focused on the present moment. These lived experiences are what feminist scholar Anne Cvetkovich accredits to “the value of process and the art of daily living” through an “embodied practice.” Drawing from feminist interpretations of Lacanian jouissance, this paper locates presence and attentiveness via slowness as a primary site of female creativity that differs. Both as a gesture of delaying and as being other, a play Derrida refers to as ‘Dif-férance’ it is particularly generative for new ways of knowing. As a means of refinement that “work upon or shape” the practices of needlework, macramé and weaving can be understood as means of knowledge and ways of being in the world.