Abstract
This paper positions telephone switchboard operating as a textile tradition in the full disciplinary sense: a practice organized around embodied skill, the transmission of bodily knowledge through community, and the production of relational connection as material output. Drawing on feminist labor history, textile theory, and Daniela Rosner’s framework of critical fabulation, it argues that the systematic erasure of switchboard labor by electromechanical automation constitutes a form of textile loss: one structurally identical to the suppression of feminized craft work in computing history. The paper then presents the design logic of This Is Vera, Hold Please, a performance installation in development in which a dancer’s body, instrumented with electromyographic (EMG) and inertial sensors, physically reconstructs the gestural repertoire of exchange work. The installation is framed as a practice-based research method for recovering what written records cannot hold: the kinesthetic intelligence of a practice that lived in the hands.
Keywords
Switchboard labor; Bodily knowledge; Critical fabulation; Practice-based research; Feminist labor history
DOI
10.21606/TI-2026.104
Citation
Ma, Y.(2026) Threading the Line: Switchboard Labor, Bodily Knowledge, and the Textile Traditions of Telephone Operating, in Jane Scott, Sophie Skach, and Rebecca Stewart (eds.), Textile Intersections 2026, 17-18 September 2026, London, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/TI-2026.104
Conference Track
researchpapers
Included in
Threading the Line: Switchboard Labor, Bodily Knowledge, and the Textile Traditions of Telephone Operating
This paper positions telephone switchboard operating as a textile tradition in the full disciplinary sense: a practice organized around embodied skill, the transmission of bodily knowledge through community, and the production of relational connection as material output. Drawing on feminist labor history, textile theory, and Daniela Rosner’s framework of critical fabulation, it argues that the systematic erasure of switchboard labor by electromechanical automation constitutes a form of textile loss: one structurally identical to the suppression of feminized craft work in computing history. The paper then presents the design logic of This Is Vera, Hold Please, a performance installation in development in which a dancer’s body, instrumented with electromyographic (EMG) and inertial sensors, physically reconstructs the gestural repertoire of exchange work. The installation is framed as a practice-based research method for recovering what written records cannot hold: the kinesthetic intelligence of a practice that lived in the hands.