Karen Donnellan and Suzanne Peck are artists, educators, feminists (intersectional) and passionate glass community members. We first delivered the lecture “Blow Harder: Language Gender and Sexuality in the Glass Blowing Studio” at the 2017 Glass Art Society Conference in Norfolk, Virginia. Our focus on language is a slice of a much larger conversation which looks like ‘The location and implication of gender, misogyny and patriarchal hierarchies in the hot glass studio”. What are the words that might be worth considering in the light of that larger conversation? The original Blow Harder: Alternative Lexicons responded to the ongoing misogyny in the hot glass studio and offered broader language, with options for all. We created these lexicons through a series of consultations starting in 2017, with added updates following the #MeToo movement.
The newest Sex Positive Lexicon poster addresses our need to acknowledge the hot shop as a sexy place- linguistically and potentially, materially. The language pushes further into the absurd, humorous and queer. Glass is a sexy material and working with glass can be a sensual act. We want to honour that aspect of the studio, leaning deeply into the juicy, tantalizing nature of working in the hot shop through language. This new list is a queering of the space, material, and process and extends the same fundamental impetus as the original lexicons: create new opportunities for language to upend the kyriarchy*.
Please see exhalewithvigor.org for more.
*Kyriarchy encompasses sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, xenophobia, economic injustice, prison-industrial complex, colonialism, militarism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, speciesism and other forms of dominating hierarchies in which the subordination of one person or group to another is internalized and institutionalized.
