‘Her Work Shouts Out!’:Feminist Embroidered Texts in the Era of Social Media

IN 1895, AGNES Richter finished embroidering her words onto an asylum jacket, turning the standard-issue article of clothing into a textual object. Around the same time, workhouse inmate Lorina Bulwer was also embroidering, in her case, on long scrolls of fabric overflowing with carefully stitched words and images. These two textile and textual objects have much in common: both were produced by women who were incarcerated against their will (Bulwer in an English workhouse, Richter in the Hubertusberg asylum in Germany) and who were in their fifties when they would have produced these works, and both pieces have embroidered text that document the thoughts and experiences of their creators.

For women in an asylum, who may or may not have needed to be there,1 sewing was a way to stay occupied, a task that was likely sanctioned by the institutions housing them. But also evident within these highly domestic objects is the longer history of women’s subversive textual expression through embroidered craft: Richter used her jacket as a kind of diary, stitching it with comments like, ‘I wish to read,’ and, ‘I plunge headlong into disaster.’2 Bulwer, on the other hand, ‘spat out her anger,’ to use the words of Lyons and Marquilhas, and, in sewing her name again and again onto the scroll of text, forcefully asserted her own identity.3 The ferocity and passion of Bulwer’s words are underscored by the patience she must have needed in order to stitch them into material form. As one visitor of the Shoddy Exhibition’s workshop on the scroll noted: ‘Sewing was […] likely an occupation to keep Lorina quiet […] but her work shouts out!’4

These works—and their words—speak loudly, but who, if anyone, was listening? Bulwer wrote her scrolls as a letter, yet there is no indication that they ever reached their intended recipient; doctors at the Heidelberg asylum took little to no interest in Richter’s embroidery or her jacket, with no recorded mention of it in her medical file.5 Surrounding the passionate voices carried through in carefully stitched text is, then, a deafening silence. What these turn-of-the-century women lacked were networks through which they could share their textual creations with others.

In our own time, feminists are again turning to craft as a way to amplify their messages—to shout out—while also finding ways to share these creations with a broad online readership. This article examines one example of this networked craftivist trend, the Tiny Pricks Project. The project invites participants to embroider the Tweets of Donald J. Trump in acts of feminist protest and also to post images of their works on social media platforms. In this way, the project informs twenty-first-century textual production, with the embroidered texts located at a compelling and somewhat contradictory cross-section of current textual creation: a move towards the permanent and embodied, but employing fourth-wave/‘hashtag’ feminist strategies of digital connectivity and collective action.

Moreover, taking textual objects like these into account engages with current discussions of women’s book history,6 and also follows Adriaan van der Weel’s call to take a broader view within the field of book studies. In Changing our Textual Minds, van der Weel noted that ‘[b]ook studies used to be confined to the printed book and other products of the printing press. However, the recognition is now beginning to take hold that book studies should take a longer perspective, and deal with the history of textual transmission at large. […] The material book,’ he says, ‘is merely one particular, historical form in which text is materialized.’7 Pushing the boundaries of the book in this way to include oral, digital, and crafted textual productions can serve to reclaim lost voices, fill in archival gaps, and acknowledge the importance of writing for marginalized and censored groups. For women in particular, as Rozsika Parker has said, ‘[t]o know the history of embroidery is to know the history of women.’8

Craftivism

The Tiny Pricks Project encourages embroidered reproduction of digital texts as a kind of protest or activism. Although firmly situated in the twenty-first century, through its use of craft as a vehicle for textual activism, the project connects to a long history of women using domestic craft for political ends. In the article ‘Pricking the Male Ego,’ Mary Donaldson-Evans argues that needlework, although often associated with domesticity and subservience, has been a means of resistance throughout the centuries. ‘In both the medieval cloth and the modern sampler,’ she says, ‘women have used the tools […] of a quintessentially ‘feminine’ activity to express a distinctly insubordinate attitude.’9 Donaldson-Evans points to examples from literature, such as the feminine uprising in Frank L. Baum’s The Land of Oz, in which women take the city with knitting needles pulled from their hair, as an example of how feminine tools of suppression can be used as ‘weapons that threaten the patriarchal order.’10 Although some women did, apparently, use feminine tools like hatpins to violent ends,11 women’s resistance through domestic tools has more often been, to use Parker’s word, subversive—for example, using hidden or coded imagery, which could be a means of covert political expression.12

Crafts like embroidery were and continue to be employed to resist dominant social messages and power structures, as well as to establish new aesthetics and build community. Such practices have in the past been labeled as ‘subversive stitchery’ and ‘femmage’—a broader term that includes ‘activities […] practiced by women using traditional women’s techniques to achieve their art’13 and which encompasses embroidery as well as collage, scrapbooking, and cooking. Such practices relied on women’s domestic skills, gift economies based on sharing, and principles of reuse. They created a kind of ‘private female language,’14 which may be expressed through visual and/or verbal elements in such creations as communal recipe books, quilts, and tapestries, to name just a few.

A more recent term to gain popularity is ‘craftivism,’ which places a clear focus on craft as activism. The word ‘craftivism’ was first introduced by Betsy Greer in the 2003, and, in her 2014 book on the same subject, Greer wrote that ‘the very essence of craftivism lies in creating something that gets people to ask questions […] to join a conversation about the social and political intent of the creations.’15 Craftivism has been used by guerilla artists and at-home crafters,16 as well as community-focused sewing groups, such as the UK-based Profanity Embroidery Group.

One political area particularly interesting to craftivists is women’s rights and gender and sexual equality. Looking at Swedish embroidered comic books, Nordenstam and Wictorin write that artists like Åsa Schagerström ‘are using traditionally feminine crafts to raise contemporary issues related to gender and politics.’17 Crafting texts amplifies their messages, as the reader interprets not only the text but the means of creation, which is rooted in a history of women’s subversive expression. As one page from Schagerström’s comic Urmodern asks, ‘If I embroider the words, will they be better heard?’

Crafting emphasizes presence, permanence, mindfulness, and agency, and the rise of craftivism seems to be a direct reaction to the ephemeral and disembodied nature of digital media. In the book Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery, Leanne Prain writes that ‘[w]hile our faces often glow in the lights of laptops, many of us still have the urge to express ourselves through the use of tactile materials.’18 At the same time, much feminist activism is taking place online, with current fourth-wave or ‘hashtag’ feminism making effective use of online connectivity for social media campaigns. Despite the success of campaigns like #metoo and #niunamenos, Jessica Megarry has questioned social media’s usefulness as a feminist tool, noting that today’s feminists ‘appear to be relying on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter—globally dominant, capitalist, male-owned companies—to start a revolution.’19

While not abandoning this critical gaze, the following will more closely address one example of feminist craftivism, the Tiny Pricks Project, to examine how social media provides a way for participants to collectively (re)read and (re)make cultural texts, share productions widely with an interested readership, and, through display, encourage greater and more varied forms of participation in global activist networks.

Tiny Pricks

The Tiny Pricks Project is a public art project started by New York artist Diana Weymar in 2018. The project protests the presidency of Donald J. Trump by embroidering Trump’s Tweets, with the intention of creating ‘a material record of his presidency and of the movement against it.’20 The very first piece was by Weymar, who stitched ‘I am a very stable genius,’ a now infamous Trump Tweet, on an old piece of her grandmother’s needlepoint. Following on from this first piece, the project collected Tweets that have been embroidered on a variety of objects from over 1,000 global participants, making it, according to the project website, ‘the largest textile Trump protest’ ever.21

Weymar has made it clear that the project aims to provide a ‘counterbalanc[e] to the impermanence of Twitter and other social media,’22 and the project thus taps into modern anxieties about digital content. Although digital technology offers many added values, such as ease of access and intertextuality,23 to quote Naomi Baron, ‘posting something online, in today’s world, can mean losing awareness of what exists, where it is, who has access to it, who is accountable for it, and what is being done with it.’24 The project freezes Trump’s ephemeral Tweets in material form as a way to increase awareness and ask for accountability, but also calls into question the reliability of born-digital texts. This issue has only intensified with time as Donald Trump’s Twitter ban has led to problems regarding the government’s archiving of presidential Tweets.25 With banned, deleted, and unarchived Tweets, it is interesting to think of the archival as well as activist work these embroidered pieces do. Through slow, deliberate, artistic presentations, the works provide a contrast to the seemingly unconsidered, off-the-cuff, and at times nonsensical social media posts of Trump—and on a larger scale the culture of hate and discrimination fomented by the Trump administration and social media echo chambers it thrived in.

A benefit to stitchers engaged in the project, and which applies to craftivism more broadly, is the sense of agency and action it allows. Writing about the Tiny Pricks Project, Weymar has said that the project provides an outlet and a way of making a difference, one small stitch at a time: ‘with each tiny prick of the needle,’ she said, ‘we’re piercing little holes into things that feel overwhelming, unsurmountable, and scary.’26 Agency is expressed not only in the physical act of making but also in how crafters choose to present the text. Crafters of Trump Tweets put their own spin on the text, for example, mocking the content by using different surrounding images, changing the text slightly, adding visual elements, and by placing the words onto objects that affect interpretation.

Pieces do not present original words but rather create their protest through reframing the words of Trump, placing the words against unexpected and often innocent backdrops to create jarring juxtapositions. Patterns on fabric used for sewing can influence the interpretation of the text, such as with a handkerchief on cow-themed cloth that riffs on the catchphrase ‘fake news’ with ‘fake moos!’ Quotes offensive to women and girls have been sewn onto underwear and adorned with embroidered breasts, cats, and pink ‘pussy’ hats. One piece sews the quote ‘I could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters’ onto an antique infant’s pinafore.27

These works, then, act as a kind of active or resistant reading—a ‘reading against the grain’ that turns readers from consumers to producers.28 Many of Trump’s most infamous quotes have been highly offensive to women and girls. The use of embroidery goes beyond reading the words from a feminist perspective, as crafters support their protest by embedding the words in a history of women’s and feminist tradition. A comment by a participant of the Tiny Pricks Project sums up the viewpoint nicely, saying, ‘I think it’s really cool that we’re doing something feminine against this anti-feminist man we hate so much.’29

When looking through pieces in the project, it is clear that creating a material record is not the priority for most contributors. If it were, there would not be so many works referencing the same text. Rather, in an Internet meme-like fashion, Tweets are recreated over and over again by different participants, each adding something new or unique along the way. This meme-like quality is supported by the strong online presence of the project, which has a website as well as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest pages, on which participants can share embroidered works and easily connect to the project through the hashtag #tinypricks. This hyperlinking through hashtags means that the piece can be instantly connected to the project and interested viewers, even if the new crafted object is not sent to Weymar for collection.

Although Weymar collects and curates embroidered pieces, displaying them at times in public exhibitions, for most people, seeing pieces in the project means looking at the project’s Instagram page. On social media pages, Web 2.0 affordances allow people to connect (friend, follow), share (retweet), and show support (comment, like). These online spaces, beyond displaying individual pieces, introduce the project to a global audience and provide instructions on how to participate. The project webpage, for example, suggests groups meet locally to work on pieces for the project, with a shared Google Doc listing groups that meet in person. One such group in Greensboro, North Carolina, put on a show of their pieces before sending them in to Weymar, saying ‘we agreed that this project has been so therapeutic and fun that we will likely continue meeting as a group after the show.’30

According to the project website, contributors are encouraged to post to Instagram, Twitter, and other social media sites, for recognition and as a way to encourage others to participate. This ties into what Clay Shirky has labeled a ‘publish-then-filter’31 logic of social media, that sees amateurs sharing content ‘as an anchor for community and cooperation.’32 When it is not possible to meet together to create, social media allows people to meet through the sharing of their creations. And in this way, displaying craftivist productions encourages others to participate, share, and engage. As Greer writes: ‘As craftivists, we are also permission-givers […]. We […] give other craftivists permission to make boldly, make with the greater good in mind, and make in order to nourish ourselves.’33

The Tiny Pricks Project is thus an example not only of the power of craft for feminist activism to reposition and repurpose texts for political ends, but also the complicated movement of content in the digital age: how an off-the-cuff digital remark can slip into the material as protest, and the material can cycle back into digital networkability and collectivity—and how through digital channels, voices stitched into the material record are finding ways to be heard.

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Ellen Barth is a research associate and doctoral candidate in Book Studies at the University of Münster, Germany, researching American community cookbooks and women’s participation in alternative and amateur self-publishing in the second half of the twentieth century.