Witches of Design threads the radical history of Shaker design through the figure of the witch, recovering a narrative of feminine insubordination embedded within one of design history's most canonical aesthetic traditions.
About This Book
In 1837, a wave of ecstatic trances swept through the Shaker community — women spinning, vibrating, repurposing the sect's familiar objects in acts that read as both spiritual possession and quiet revolt. Alexandra Midal seizes on this rupture, the so-called Era of Manifestations, to reframe the entire Shaker design legacy. Those rocking chairs and flat brooms, so often celebrated for their austere functionalism, become objects charged with the creative power of women who had seen their freedoms gradually eroded. Drawing on the founding figure of Ann Lee, Midal constructs a design history where trance, feminism, and material culture are inseparable — a slim but arresting argument for how design history gets written, and by whom.
Key Features
- 64 pages of essay-driven narrative interweaving design history and feminist theory
- Author: Alexandra Midal
- Published by Mudac, RADDAR Editions, ISBN: 9782378966317
What You'll Discover
- How the Shaker Era of Manifestations reframes the sect's canonical objects — rocking chairs, flat brooms — as sites of feminine agency rather than simply austere utility
- The figure of Ann Lee as a founding radical, and how her legacy was gradually domesticated within Shaker institutional life
- The intersection of trance, insubordination, and material culture as a method for writing design history from the margins
- A mode of design criticism that draws on spiritual and feminist histories simultaneously, unsettling conventional design historiography
About the Author
Alexandra Midal is a design historian and curator whose work interrogates the political and cultural conditions that produce design practice and its histories. Her writing consistently moves between critical theory and material analysis.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 64
- Dimensions: 12 × 19 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9782378966317
- Publisher: Mudac, RADDAR Editions
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Design historians, feminist scholars, and practitioners interested in the political dimensions of design history and the material culture of utopian communities.