2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

Since the publication of E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, textiles have featured recurrently in historians’ accounts of the making of power relations. Recognising that the large-scale production of textiles in metropolitan Britain drove key developments across the British imperial world, historians of South Asia and Australia alike have challenged and greatly expanded the national focus on the production of class relations in Thompson’s foundational text. Meanwhile feminist scholarship has insisted that the production of class relations are always also the making of gender and race relations.

This panel returns to textiles as a key site of production, in which the politics of gender take material as well as discursive form. The papers explore textile ‘work’ from three different perspectives: the significance of cloth and clothing in the production of middle-class masculinity and femininity in colonial Sydney; the power of embroidery to fashion feminist collective identity in cold-war Australia; and the meanings of workers’ protest songs in textile factories of post-1947 Bengal. The panel brings into conversation different moments in imperial history, viewed from various standpoints in colonial experience. What unites the papers and makes the conversation possible is their shared use of micro-historical approaches to interrogate the making of gender relations, and to explore the role of textiles in both making and contesting imperial power. Weaving new global historiographies into local studies of cultural productions, the panel offers new interpretations of gender, class, culture and commerce.