Embroidered Feminist Rhetoric in Andrea Dezső’s Lessons from My Mother

Abstract

Artist Andrea Desző’s embroideries, inspired by the Romanian traditional sampler, belong to the material turn in cultural and feminist studies. Based on a comparison with first-wave feminist ideas in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s Women and Economics, this analysis interrogates what embroidery—as a form of discourse—tells about the little-known Eastern-European woman’s condition. In the region significantly different from Western Europe in both postcolonialist and post-Marxist analyses, these artifacts reveal the ambivalent condition of women situated at the intersection of tradition, feminist thought, and Marxist practice, after Marxist-led governments had provided women with a workplace and equality, at least in theory.

Notes

1. 1I thank RR Editor Theresa Enos and reviewers Maureen Goggin and Ersula Ore for constructive feedback; Dr. Angela Haas and Dr. Susan Kalter for discussions leading to my project; and Dr. Edith Baker, whose close reading improved this manuscript. Photos courtesy of the artist, Andrea Dezso. I thank my parents, without whose support and household help I could not have written the paper.

2. 2With the enlargement of the European Union, the legitimacy of the term Eastern Europe is challenged given its perpetuation of orientalist East-West dichotomies. I use it to emphasize a culturally different category of alterity-making useful to my analysis.

3. 3The artist’s website features some of the artifacts exhibited; it also includes digital animated embroidery work. <http://AndreaDezso.com>.

4. 4I thank the artist, Andrea Dezső, for providing me with high-resolution files for all the figures representing her own embroideries.

5. 5<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89232061>.

6. 6<http://www.traditionalromanesc.ro/anunt/regiune_transilvania/mestesuguri/tesaturi/tesaturi-sasestiunguresti-fete-de-masa-peretare-cu-scrisuri-huse-pentru-biblie–sallai-maria_588.html>.

7. 7<http://www.banaterra.eu/romana/otelu-rosu-judetul-caras-severin-peretare>. <http://www.banaterra.eu/romana/otelec-peretare>. 10 February 2014. Web. <http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/phrenology>. 10 February 2014. Web.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adriana Cordali Gradea

Adriana Gradea is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University, specializing in rhetoric and cultural theory. She graduated from “Romulus Ladea” Visual Arts High School in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. She has a BA from “Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a Graduate Certificate in Advanced International Studies from The Johns Hopkins University in Bologna, Italy, and an MA in English from Bradley University. Her research and teaching interests are in feminist and visual rhetorics, as well as Marxism, postcolonialism, and posttotalitarian approaches.