The Intimate Distance of a Feminine Industry

• In Event: If/When We Have Fun: Gender Subjectivities in Leisure

Abstract

This paper identifies a contradictory scale of intimate distance demanded by post-Fordist production and personified in the scrapbook industry by the self-branded celebrity designer. Discourses of uniqueness provide a space of overlap between craft and marketing in which the craft designer is aligned with the possessive individual of traditionally masculine and capitalist modes of production (Scharff, 2012, p. 6). The paper also points to the role of design contests as a pathway where hobbyists are reconfigured into designers and, for a limited few, celebrities. Attention is paid to the scandal surrounding the 2007 Creating Keepsakes magazine’s annual Hall of Fame contest as readers challenged rhetoric of the magazine that anyone could win as a cover-up for the promotion of predetermined celebrities. Throughout, the paper situates designer celebrities or self-brands as part of a negotiated feminine scale of intimate distance used to mask the depersonalized scale of industrial production.

Author

• Katie Ellen McCollough, Rutgers