It is not, of course, that there is anything wrong with making (although it is not all that clear that the world needs more stuff ). It is that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing — it is nearly always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to Facebook community moderators (Chen 2014) to the social worker to the surgeon. Describing oneself as a maker — regardless of what one actually or mostly does — is a way to accrue the gendered capitalist benefits of being a person who makes products.
Debbie Chachra, “Beyond Making,” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentry Sayers, Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
Debbie Chachra’s argument about the “gendered capitalist benefits” of calling oneself a maker reveals something uncomfortable under the surface of “maker culture”. The way “making” is not properly framed in our society masks the true nature of valuable works. To be more exact, while “making” is commonly consider the one and only worthwhile way to live, the invisible labors behind everything made by human, especially work done by women, are unseen and underpaid.
What Debbie Chachra stated made me reflect on my understanding of value creation. Growing up in a household where my mom had to balance her career and domestic work, I witnessed how the two facets of her works are societally valued differently and gap between what our society commonly celebrates and what actually keeps families and relationships functioning. Her work at home is seen as “support” rather than “real work” whereas her work in corporate is labled “productive”. This duo societal value of hers connected back to when Chachra first mentioned maker as an idenity. In my mom’s case, I would not call her a maker since I believe it in some way obsures all the care labor that makes the more visible type of work possible. I think it’s meaningful that we ask ourselves what we prioritize in our field. This further connects to Emily Johnson and Anastasia Salter’s concept “critical making”. By this I’m referring to the idea that besides how we make things, we must think about why and for whom. On top of what Chachra suggested, this concept also push us to think beyond “making” to the labor and care that makes “making” possible. They reminds us that our field needs more “caring” than “making”.
P.s. Moving forwards this term, I’m eager to explore more digital humanities methodologies especially those focusing on appraoching traditional humanities problems through modern technology lens.
