SewQueer Blog: An Introduction
A fat white person with a shaved head looks down and smiles.
Three and a half years ago, I published a post on my personal sewing blog introducing the #SewQueer hashtag and the @sewqueer instagram group. That little post brought together many thoughts and feelings I’d been having about my own making, my place in the sewing community, and my blooming and newly-reaffirmed relationship with my partner Morgan. The post was at once a manifesto on making and identity, a charge to the sewing community to be more inclusive, and a challenge to myself to be brave and bold in my sewing, relationships, and identity.
The queer sewing Instagram community I feared might flounder within a month has grown vastly and is now at the beginning of a new stage as we launch this blog. To mark this moment, I’d like to look back on that first post and reflect on where we’ve come since then.
Making
Gender and sexual identity, like sewing, are acts of continual making. Both exist in the place where the practical and the theoretical meet, where the things we do rub up against the expectations of the world, where we build on and play with established understandings of what bodies are and mean. Both offer historical lineages and communities, both allow us to care for ourselves and make connections with others. Both are projects to connect the felt with the seen, to bring into being images of ourselves that connect with the way we feel in our bodies, the way our souls (spirits, beings) inhabit our flesh and bones and sinews. Both are intimately individual and joyously communal.
A fat white person wearing a silk dress and velvet top.
My style tends towards bold patterns and luxurious fabrics. It’s hard to find those things in my size in ready-to-wear, so I’ve turned to making. This lets me take up the space I deserve.
I’ve always been drawn to the concept of making as a way of understanding ourselves and our world. As a child, I spent countless hours in all manner of creative pursuits: sketching out fantastical outfits, arranging intricate sets for my dolls, sculpting the tiniest clay miniatures, and swathing myself in fabric to become someone else.
As an undergraduate, I quickly discovered art history, which would become my career. As a graduate student, I turned once more to sewing as a way to engage my mind and my hands beyond the long hours of reading required in my coursework. My queer identity was always tangled up in these moments of making, even when I wasn’t able to articulate it yet.
Through SewQueer, I’ve come to more fully understand the power and complexities of another making: making community. I’ve joked that the one true shared experience of being queer or trans is that we all, at some point in time, have felt not queer or trans enough. We do not have hundreds of examples available to know the many ways of being available to us. We are not often born into a community of queerness. We have to make: make ourselves, make our relationships, make our families, make our communities.
In nurturing the SewQueer Instagram page, I’ve seen and felt the power of making connections and finding new queer sewing friends. I’ve appreciated the outpouring of knowledge on each and every #SewQueeries post. And, at the same time, I’ve felt deeply frustrated with Instagram as a platform and its limitations. It lacks necessary accessible features, it is easy to get lost in the never-ending feed and hard to search for specific posts, and it doesn’t allow space for longer, more nuanced discussion.
Additionally, because SewQueer is a public page, anyone can access it and comment. This has allowed us to grow from a few dozen followers to more than 7,000 today! But it also means challenges when it comes to affirming the mission and political stance of SewQueer.
With all that in mind, I’m so happy to be launching this new part of the SewQueer community: a multi-vocal blog with space for longer essays and tutorials, all centered under our mission of making, community, resilience, and the queer power of imagining new futures.
Hacking
In all of these parts of my life, I feel like I’m pattern hacking: not quite creating anew, but alternately struggling with a lack of available designs and reveling in the process of invention. I’m having fun, but sometimes I wish it were easier, that someone had gone there first, that I could do the work once and not have to adapt and change as time goes on.
A white, fat person wearing a two-piece swimsuit with high neck and shorts.
I made my soft butch bikini because nothing like it existed in the world. It’s self-drafted and one-of-a-kind, and makes me feel so powerful.
As a queer, demisexual, genderqueer, solitary, neurodivergent, fat, dykey, lesbian academic, I’ve often felt like I’m stumbling through without examples for how to live my life. This feeling is what has driven me to share so much of my own life experiences with my social media community. I don’t wish to be a model for anyone, but I’m happy to be a suggestion, a possibility, a glimmer of one way to live.
In three and a half years of running SewQueer, I’ve seen so many of the same questions crop up again and again, from the practical to the philosophical. “How do I make clothes that fit my body?” “How do I make space for sewing in my life?” “How do I find queer friends?” While we perhaps cannot answer all of these, I hope that the blog can become home to some suggestions.
What we aim to host here are posts that offer ways of making: personal essays that explore individual identity and sewing practice; tutorials that focus on sewing techniques of specific use to queer and trans sewists; and resource roundups that connect our community to information elsewhere. Perhaps this way, we won’t be pattern hacking all alone.
Thinking
Back in 2017, I posed three questions to get SewQueer started. They feel as relevant as ever, and so I offer them up once more as a starting point for this new venture.
What does it mean to self-fashion? When it feels like there is a great gulf between the ways we want to embody and the ways the world perceives us, how can sewing help us traverse that gulf?
What does gender look and move and feel like to each of us? How do we transform gender through our stitches?
How do we understand and experience love as a deliberate act of making? What kinds of relationships can we envision outside of the model of heterosexual monogamy? How does sewing help us engender and sustain relationships of love and community?
Changing
I know I’m queer, but there are many other labels that feel up for grabs right now. Though I have, until recently, identified as cisgender and feel a deep connection and solidarity to the historical and political category of woman, I’m also drawn to genderqueerness, of allowing myself more leeway and creativity and potential in the ways my gender identity, embodiment, and presentation line up – or don’t. When it comes to the way I understand my attractions to and relationships with other people, queerness has been at the forefront for a decade, but I’ve also been adding in demisexuality and spinsterhood, working on developing a way of being that is primarily independent. At the same time, I’ve recently been building a loving and nourishing romantic relationship with a dear and very beloved companion, Morgan, based on supporting one another’s independence.
Two white people sit on the steps of a brick front porch, laughing and smiling.
Morgan and I have worked to develop a relationship that really nurtures our individual needs. I’m so happy to have them in my life and supporting me in all my pursuits.
Until the beginning of this year, I was the only person behind SewQueer. That obviously had to change as we grew, and I’m excited to have welcomed an editorial team, Ainsley, Bri, and Lizzy, who have done all the heavy lifting in getting this blog off the ground. I’m excited to grow the behind-the-scenes team with a greater diversity of contributors as we move forward. (Interested in helping out? Shoot me an email!)
The three and a half years of SewQueer have also seen changes in my life, identity, and sewing. What was a newly re-started relationship with my partner, Morgan, is now almost four years strong. We have two households that are now just a four-hour drive apart, a revolutionarily short distance for us! I’ve been so honored and proud to support them as they grow into themselves, becoming the monkish trans farmer they were always meant to be.
As for me, I’m happier in a genderqueer identity (though pronouns remain an unanswered question), and since that first blog post I’ve thrown myself into shirtmaking in a big way! Life and body changes, major surgery, and a pandemic have shifted how I want my clothes to fit, and so I still haven’t made that tailored suit I challenged myself to make. I started a tenure-track art history job a year ago that takes up more of my time than ever, but also gives me more resources to put back into the queer community, for which I’m deeply thankful.
Bio: Shannon (she/her) is a queer sewist and art historian, living and teaching in the midwest. She shares her own sewing, mushroom farming, and dollhouse making on Instagram at @rare.device and is the founder of SewQueer.
To learn more about Shannon, you can watch her IG Live replay on YouTube by clicking here.
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