Knitting and catastrophe

AbstractThe popular representation of knitting in mainstream film and in the novel is either as a cozy, unchallenging domestic occupation, or more frequently as a craft practiced by the mentally unstable, the dangerous and, in some cases, the divinatory. While conforming to popular cliches of the solitary knitter, these often lurid representations construct knitting as a precarious, amorphous, and uncontainable medium, something that is fundamental to the physical act of enclosing space with yarn which might unravel at any given moment. This potential to lose shape, to literally be formless, provides this article with a critical context, and using Georges Bataille's notion of the informe (formless) proposes that popular culture's stereotypes resonate far beyond screen and page, and can help us understand the potentially catastrophic act of knitting.