Stitches, Bitches, and Bodies: Textiles and the Twenty-First Century 'Female' Body

Stitches, Bitches, and Bodies explores the gendered and material politics of bodies and textiles in performance. It looks at how knitting, weaving, embroidery, and cloth perform the gendered body as a site of political upheaval, creation, and destruction. Here, I analyse how twenty-first century western artists and activists use textiles to explore the politics of bodies in space. Focusing predominately on western, feminist, queer, racialized, and activist artists, this project asks what threads these artists pick up, and why. It contextualizes itself within and across feminism, performance studies, and material culture studies, bringing all three together to develop theories of feminism and identity politics that queer the body, embrace dialectics, and explode binary concepts around gender and sexuality. It asks, can we use the traditional method of knitting, sewing, and weaving, to stage the body in startlingly new ways? How do we contextualize craft in contemporary protest and performance alongside feminist conversations and politics? Can we find the ghost of the seamstress in our own affective and phenomenological discourse with the world around us, our oppression, and our privilege? Stitches, Bitches, and Bodies demonstrates how seemingly passive textile works can illuminate structures of intolerance and oppression in contemporary art and politics. It unpacks contemporary politics at the intersection between objects and bodies, and between textiles and gender/sexuality/race. Seeing the stage, the body, and the street as contemporary sites with political stakes, Stitches, Bitches, and Bodies aims to uncover a practice of knitting, weaving, and embroidery found behind picket lines and in/on skin.