The queens of loud machines: Knitting and making music in West Berlin in the 1970s–1980s

Abstract

“Those old eco-feminists knitted. But we were using a machine! That was a big difference indeed” (2020, personal interview with the author). That statement was made by musician and knitwear designer Gudrun Gut of the punk girl band Mania D./Malaria! and it cuts out what this article is about: Women knitting and making music on their machines in the subculture of West Berlin in the late 1970s and early 1980s. New and easily accessible technology, such as the Atari console, enabled new Do-It-Yourself strategies. At the same time—within fashion and knitting in particular—there was a shift in feminist generations: Loud, technical, noisy music, and machine-made knitwear signified aggressive, modern, and self-assured women. In West Berlin specifically, punk women musicians and designers looked back in time, and sought to reconnect with the hedonistic avant-garde and the “new women,” the divas, dadaists, and women modernists of Berlin in the 1910s–1930s.