Crafting queer shame, through the divisions of class

Abstract

Through theoretical and creative analysis, this practice-led research articulates the conditions of queer, class-shame through the exploration of various craft disciplines. In addressing the problematic absence of class analysis within queer shame debates, this project utilises distinct processes within ceramic, textile, drawing and woodwork practices that accommodate improvised and amateur dimensions of studio production. In considering the social aspects of shame, this research questions how assimilative practices can promote doxic investments in class-based privileges that complicate the ways in which sexual identities are politically represented and culturally expressed. By challenging limiting readings that position queer shame as a socially regressive subject-matter, alongside other debates that dismiss class as a reductive category of contemporary analysis, this practice-led research highlights the disruptive impact of cross-class mobility and its contribution to queer, class-shame. Approached as an individualised experience marked by isolation and irreconcilability, this practice-led research conceptualises such temporality through the engagement with low-grade materials that absolve traditional craft histories and esteemed procedures of production. Air-dry clay vessels, tufted-rugs, coloured pencil drawings and lathe turned objects are presented as embodiments of this, proposing haptic reorientations of making that point towards underlying interests of queer domesticity and abstraction. Through rigorous intersectional analysis of queer, class and shame discourse, new frameworks arise that wrestle with the pleasures and precarities that accompany the realities of hand-making and thus demonstrates the critical relationship between material, surface and form in situating queer, class-conscious perspectives.

Date of Award	Aug 2025
Original language	English
Supervisor	Suzanna Chan (Supervisor) & Joseph Mc Brinn (Supervisor)