Suturing Adversity in Estranged Spaces: Kairos and Meaning Making in Women’s Needlework Samplers
Suturing Adversity in Estranged Spaces: Kairos and Meaning Making in Women’s Needlework Samplers

Summary/Abstract: The proposed paper takes as its object of investigation the overlooked and often despised category of women’s domestic arts as sites of important cultural, social and rhetorical work. Specifically, this paper explores the complex relationship between women and needlework stitched in times and places of adversity, such as prisons, charity schools, and orphanages. How do women respond to such adversity in creating a silken communication? What function do the pieces they stitched serve? How do these pieces offer new insights into women’s lives and material conditions? While current work on women and material culture has focused primarily on women as consumers, this paper provides case studies of women as producers of needlework, turning to ’local’ or ’situated knowledge’, to justify the claim that women’s stitching can be interpreted as an epistemic activity, defined as gendered. Here I also argue for touch and the dexterity of the practiced hand as ways of knowing and demonstrate not only the deep knowledge of the material used, but also the creation and communication of knowledge about women’s material condition, as definitions of their rhetorical engagement. As such, women’s manipulation of the world is central to constructing social meanings that operate beyond the traditionally prescribed (and circumscribed) boundaries typically occupied by women.

• Details
• Contents