Textile Material Metaphors to Describe Feminist Textile Activisms: From Threading Yarn, to Knitting, to Weaving Politics

Abstract

In this article, we present the continuum proposed by Anne Beth Pentney in 2008 as a way of describing feminist political action in the fiber arts, and discuss its limitations using three textile material metaphors. These metaphors evolve from an empirical analysis undertaken in Bogotá, Colombia, of various textile initiatives in the public sphere. We first describe how the continuum proposed by Pentney is based on the textile image of a yarn spun out of three different threads. Secondly, we show the potentiality of knitting a standard pattern, which entangles the continuum, allowing us to understand the affective importance of collective encounters in any political textile action. Finally, we think of this continuum as a weaving textile in action, with broken and missing threads; this last metaphor allows us to think of modes of understanding textile activism which cannot be replicated or standardized but are also sustained by affective–material–embodied practices of labor and pedagogy.

Keywords:

• feminist textile activism
• textile thinking
• textile material metaphors
• weaving

Notes

Notes

1 It is important to say that most of this literature is produced within northern Anglo-Saxon contexts (that is, Canada, the US, and the UK).

2 Pentney takes for granted the fact that knitting is the textile practice of the cases she studies.

3 An infographic that summarizes the findings of our research can be found at http://artesanaltecnologica.org/pensamiento_textil_escrituras_que_resisten/. For further details of the research process see Sánchez-Aldana, Pérez-Bustos, and Chocontá Piraquive (forthcoming).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Faculty of Human Sciences of Universidad Nacional de Colombia under the Hermes code 37552; and the Design Department of Universidad de Los Andes under the code P.R.3.2016.3668.

Notes on contributors

Tania Pérez-Bustos

Tania Pérez-Bustos is an associate professor in the School of Gender Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Associate Editor of the journal Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society. She has been on the boards of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) and the Asociación Latinoamericana de Estudios Sociales de la Ciencia y la Tecnología (ESOCITE). Her current research examines textile handmade processes as technologies of knowing and caring. [email protected]

Eliana Sánchez-Aldana

Eliana Sánchez-Aldana is a feminist designer and weaver. She is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Design at the Universidad de Los Andes. She promotes spaces of collaborative creation in which textile crafts are the common language. She investigates and makes textiles as a way of thinking, as touch technologies, and as an activist action. Her current doctoral studies in social and human sciences explores material metaphors as a way of researching and making the future together. [email protected]

Alexandra Chocontá-Piraquive

Alexandra Chocontá-Piraquive is an anthropologist. She has researched sewing circles of young women embroiderers who document experiences and thoughts about their youth, femininity, and sexuality. She has promoted different spaces of textile creation in Bogotá with a feminist focus. Alexandra is a researcher at the School of Gender Studies of the National University of Colombia and a lecturer at the Design Department of Universidad de los Andes. [email protected]