Feather-Work: A Fashioned Ostrich Plume Embodies Hybrid and Violent Labors of Growing and Making

This paper uses a fashioned ostrich plume to conceptualize and re-present “feather-work” as being co-constituted by human non-human labor. The archives not only the hands that it but also bird-body grew feathers, insisting be conceptualized researched grown-made commodity. From this starting point, I reconstruct its journey along “feather-road”: from reared plucked on South African farm willowed in Euro-American sweatshops. By fleshing-out “hybrid labor” involved plume’s growing making, demonstrate feather-work exploited indigenous African, indentured migrant, sweated immigrant laborers, how yoked reproductive metabolic labor of ostriches. doing so illustrates luxury feather-fashion accessory is historically implicated colonial, economic, ecological violence, locating troubling journeys fashion’s “bio-commodities” further back time.