“A single hair carpet was an awe-inspiring sight. A whole stack of carpets, on the other hand, was a monstrosity.”[i]

Textile poetics often focus on the female body and female textile production. But globally, textile labour is not exclusively gendered as female. Nor is textile labour necessarily a route to empowerment, as the craftivism discourse of the past decade has proclaimed, or the tranquillity well-being marketing frequently advertises. Rozika Parker, in her well-cited analysis of Victorian embroidery, observed the “dual face of embroidery […] provided both a weapon of resistance for women and functioned as a source of constraint.”[ii] More recently, Joseph McBrinn’s Queering the Subversive Stitch considers some of the perspectives overlooked in Parker’s study.[iii] This writing moves into the future to consider textile production by men portrayed by German author Andreas Eschbach’s first novel Die Haarteppichknüpfer (1995), translated in English as The Hair-Carpet Weavers (2005).[iv]

[i] Andreas Eschbach The Hair-Carpet Weavers trans. Doryl Jensen (Penguin Books: 2020) pp. 265.

[ii] Rozsika Parker The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the making of the feminine (I B Tarus 2010 [1984]).

[iii] Joseph McBrinn Queering the Subversive Stitch (Bloomsbury: 2021).

[iv] The initial translation from German to English was published under the title The Carpet Makers, published by Tor Books in 2005.