Fiber Art as Feminist Method: Knitualizing Data on Sexual Assault from Electronic Health Records

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1. Feminist Methods and Queering Sociology

Abstract

Some data are difficult, insofar as they pose analytic complexities or take an emotional toll on researchers. Consider electronic health record (EHR) data on disclosures of sexual assault/abuse. Identifying the multiple overlapping sequences of events recorded in EHRs can be challenging, as can discerning patterns across patients. At the same time, reading these records can spark sorrow, anger, and traumatic memories or, alternatively, desensitize the researcher. This paper documents how I used the fiber art of knitting and a feminist perspective to address both kinds of difficulty. Physicalization—turning data into physical form, like textiles—is related to, but distinct from, data visualization. Physicalizations engage multiple senses and modes of perception, help communicate the difficult-to-comprehend, and can travel to novel locations and audiences. Neither knitting (associated with women) nor physicalizing data through knitting is inherently feminist, but both can be. Drawing on the literature on feminist methodology/ methods and data feminism, I examine how knitualization can serve as a feminist method—in this case, by elevating emotion and embodiment as ways of knowing, including the researcher as a person, and creating knowledge that aims to foster social change. After introducing the broader project—a qualitative analysis of EHR data on disclosures of sexual assault—and situating it in the sociology of health and medicine, gender, and the life course, I discuss the technique I devised to knit a shawl depicting the life course timing of sexual assault/abuse and disclosure for 154 patients (110 cisgender women, 38 cisgender men, and 6 non-cisgender individuals). I discuss what this method achieves analytically—the knowledge it produces about sexual violence and disclosure—and what it accomplishes emotionally for the researcher. I conclude with suggestions for future data physicalizations and for expanding social scientists’ use of fiber arts as a feminist method.

Author

• Laura M. Carpenter, Vanderbilt University