It’s like I have ESPN or something.
Last week, through the Modern Quilters Collective (MQC), I was targeted over the course of many days for my critiques of modern quilting and the manner in which they have been delivered. It concluded — at least for me, as it is the last critique I will acknowledge — in a thinly-veiled take down of me for not upholding [a very narrow definition of] kindness above all. This public lambasting — which was written with weaponized and twisted trauma-informed and social justice jargon — was delivered to thousands of people and received with mostly enthusiastic validation populating the comment section and provided by people and businesses with an estimated combined reach of approximately 100,000 Instagram users.
I’m not going to be accountable to or on Quiltstagram for outsized and inequitably framed accusations of harm, from someone I’ve never spoken to or about, speaking on behalf of what amounts to five “people” (more accurately, business and influencer accounts), who have neither spoken to me directly nor directly denied the merit of my critiques entirely. These “people” I have “targeted” have expansive reach and unique privilege in modern quilting, and outside of it, and offered up to the public examples of behavior aligned with problematic ideas and concerns I have about the quilting industry. I critiqued specific public statements for being misogynistic, for being racist, as well as decisions to engage defensively (or not at all!) around questions of labor justice and ethical business practices. Only one of these accounts has, to my knowledge, tried to publicly apologize for their racism and transmisogyny by naming it directly, likely due to far-reaching public critique and condemnation (and probably threats to their bottom line).
If your comparison or proximity to things like racism, misogyny, transmisogyny, and the exploitative anti-labor and pro-capitalist practices within modern quilting feels uncomfortable, I cannot help you nor will I be your scapegoat.
I assure you, none of this makes me happy. I am miserable and angry right now because a not-small segment of the modern quilting community, to which I have dedicated infinite amounts of my own personal resources in addition to my near-constant digital engagement, is being persuaded to believe that I’m the problem. But I’ve also been miserable and angry about so much in quilting for a while and have recently made great personal efforts to change that.
One of those efforts happened more organically than I thought it would. For the past few months I have wanted to close — or less ideally, transfer — the MQC for a number of reasons. On Saturday, after receiving communication from a founding member of the MQC — someone who agreed to participate in the development of rules and membership criteria in the new year — I made that decision final. In their message, they explained to me that conversations about me have been happening for “months” with “people” and a consensus was reached that it is my “tactics”, not my “point of view” or “vision”, that is the problem. I should be working harder to meet people in the middle, to catch flies with honey, etc.
I absolutely acknowledge that many people believe that there is a hierarchy of importance as it relates to what the MQC should’ve handled first, but if we don’t have a shared collective vision, if people elect to publicly and privately critique MQC versus engaging productively, and if we don’t confront the ways our peers and friends engage in problematic ways alongside (or before) our efforts to call out corporations and institutions, what can we possibly accomplish?
That said, the timing of this is incredible. Days after the MQC receives unsolicited international press, a wake of anonymous vultures swoops in to “hold accountable” a collective that has existed for six months. Then they had the audacity to try to participate in the discourse. They hadn’t done anything with or for the MQC, why care now? Where the hell had they all been? Where’s that justice they believed in?
Don’t worry, I get it. I have closed the MQC permanently. Everything’s gone. Their reputations with their business partners and future followers/customers won’t be harmed and their present and future bottom lines are safe, from intervention by the MQC and me.
Trust me, I hear them and I see them. They don’t want to change, they think things are mostly fine as is save for a little tweak here and there. Thus, I agree that I am a problem for modern quilting, or at least this segment of it, because it doesn’t want to interrupt its veneer of apolitical niceness and respectability politics to have real conversation about what an economically just, anti-racist, feminist modern quilting community could become. They would rather tokenize and speak on behalf of systemically excluded and institutionally oppressed quilters than work to dismantle the things that have allowed their persistent underrepresentation in the industry; they also want to steal their ideas, aesthetics, languages, iconography, and cultural touchstones while believing they are beyond reproach for doing so. They want to hide in their guilds and cliques and behind their precious histories. They’d rather remain silent about complicated topics that could potentially impact their relationships to institutions, corporations, and followers than use their privilege. They want white[-passing] cishet[-passing] women and their rules to dominate both the discourse and the industry and to be allowed to engage in saccharine, uncritical, and boundless enthusiasm for one another. That’s their lane, I get it.
My lane is, and has always been, different. I didn’t give quilting this much access to me before because I was terrified I would be rejected and now, I have been. I predicted this six months ago when I started the MQC. So many quilters said they wanted justice but they really only want it on their terms. Their particular iterations of niceness exclude me, my contributions to the discourse don’t qualify. Fundamentally, they see me and reject me for who I am: a feminist killjoy, an angry femme dyke, a queer disruptor. I don’t smile on command. My idealogical foremothers were Lesbian Avengers and Lavender Menaces, not entrepreneurs and libertarians. I believe incrementalism inures people to incalculable harm and is a tool of bipartisan sanctioned violence against marginalized people. I believe in radical, intentional, transformative communities, connections, and accountability for everyone, including myself. I am an abolitionist and a socialist who believes in and seeks to enact anti-racist principles in all aspects of my life. And I’m a survivor of seven years of intimate partner violence, where abuse tactics like DARVO were also employed to shame me into silence. So for my own self preservation, I will stop pretending that this particular segment of modern quilting and I have anything in common beyond fabric and thread.
I think that means we’re all getting what we want in the end, right?
