The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving—is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.
Debbie Chachra, Why I Am Not a Maker (The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 23 Jan. 2015)
Though I remain fresh and green in the field of digital humanities, I did take a WGST course entitled “Politics of Women’s Health” last term, where I learned in every sense of the meaning of women’s roles as the assumed and systematically undervalued caretaker of children and families. We had learned about women’s ascent into the workforce and their delegation as caregivers in the form of teachers, nurses, and nannies. Yet it had not occurred to me until I read this quote that even in new industries developed in eras of feminism, not only are women still being typecast into the role of caregiver, but the industries and fields which they support still fail to acknowledge the value of their work. This quote succeeds in illustrating a clear divide of values within the digital humanities community – or at least Chachra’s perceived division of values — utilizing a rhetoric that feels familiar to other gender studies topics, which immediately drew my attention.
From the (albeit little) I have learned about Digital Humanities so far, it seems as though while “making” remains important, more important is what happens to the finished product after the fact, when people come together to build onto the initial creation. Even on our very first day, our class was already brainstorming new ways to interpret and create new things out of preexisting creations (in our case, the data set regarding definitions of Digital Humanities). While yes, “making” something new takes a lot of work and creativity to bring it from idea to execution, but once it is completed, the maker ceases the process of making, at least on that particular technology. Instead, the ownership of the development shifts to those who will not only use it but improve upon it. And who exactly will do that? The repairers, the analyzers, the caregivers — all of those people who are supposedly definitively inferior to the maker — these people make digital humanities what it is and will be the ones to transform it into whatever it becomes.
I am excited to become a maker in this class (though my SketchUp progress may be limited). I’m thrilled to combine my humanities passion with new ways to define our study of the field, be it through modelling new things or failing spectacularly to do so. But moreover, I am excited to become an analyst, to become a caretaker, to become a re-inventor along with being an inventor. I look forward to working with others, to making things and learning from my peers. Therefore, I hope that we can dismantle the dangerously discriminatory “cultural primacy” currently threatening the technology industry, together in our new classroom of digital humanists-to-be.
