Abstract
(type = abstract)
The dissertation uses the highly feminized hobby of scrapbooks, or scrapbooking, as an entry point to study gendered media production, labor, and subjectivity. The use of contemporary traditional, or paper scrapbooks, as the starting point of inquiry foregrounds relations of gender and power in a digital era. Traditional scrapbooks draw attention to the historical continuity with earlier forms of feminine media and labor and how these forms align with particular identity constructions as shaped by political, economic, and social forces with deep historical roots. The focus on traditional scrapbooks draws attention to gendered boundaries that continue to demarcate socio-technical systems, definitions of work/life, and the production/consumption of specific types of media. In order to best understand the perspectives of those who scrapbook, my project utilizes a set of qualitative methods including participant observation both online and off (e.g., event attendance, social media, message boards, podcasts), over thirty in-depth interviews, and textual analysis of scrapbook magazines from the 1990s to the present. My research interjects that a concern with greater intimacy and care of the self expressed by those who scrapbook reveals a critique of current social and economic relations as lacking care, as disconnected, too impersonal and, potentially, dehumanizing. Feminist interventions have contributed to recognition of social reproductive labor within Marxist theory and of emotional labor within scholarship on immaterial labor (Weeks, 2007, p. 233; Hochschild, 1983). These feminist interventions provide an expansive notion of reproductive labor as the work of creating and sustaining social forms and relations of cooperation and sociality (Weeks, 2007; di Leonardo, 1987). This project situates scrapbooks as a form of this expansive notion of feminine social reproductive labor. The project maps intimacy and care labor within different domains of contemporary scrapbooking: the intimate-distance of the scrapbook industry, social intimacy/support of craft circles, the tactile pleasures of making craft, and self-documentation as self-work/management. These domains correspond into four chapters (excluding the introduction, literature review, and conclusion), inspired by the “keepsake buttons” distributed at a national scrapbook convention. The buttons to be earned included “I industrialized” (on the move from amateur to celebrity in the scrapbook industry), “I cropped” (scrapbook events/craft circles),” “I created” (tactile pleasures of craft), and “I learned” (scrapbook courses on documenting one’s life).