Queering the Subversive Stitch

<p>The history of men's needlework has long been considered a taboo subject. This is the first book ever published to document and critically interrogate a range of needlework made by men. It reveals that since medieval times men have threaded their own needles stitched and knitted woven lace handmade clothes as well as other kinds of textiles and generally delighted in the pleasures and possibilities offered by all sorts of needlework. Only since the dawn of the modern age in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries did needlework become closely aligned with new ideologies of the feminine. Since then men's needlework has been read not just as feminising but as queer. <p/>In this groundbreaking study Joseph McBrinn argues that needlework by male artists as well as anonymous tailors sailors soldiers convalescents paupers prisoners hobbyists and a multitude of other men and boys deserves to be looked at again. Drawing on a wealth of examples of men's needlework as well as visual representations of the male needleworker in museum collections from artist's papers and archives in forgotten magazines and specialist publications popular novels and children's literature and even in the history of photography film and television he surveys and analyses many of the instances in which needlemen have contested resisted and subverted the constrictive ideals of modern masculinity. <p/>This audacious original carefully researched and often amusing study demonstrates the significance of needlework by men in understanding their feelings agency identity and history.</p>