Stitched Together, an essay, performance, and textile project, allows insight and space to interrogate the layered and historical ways that social, affective, and counter ideological meaning is produced in textile work. Through the recreation of the quilt made for me when I was born, by 3 generations of women in my family, I was able to engage with my personal history as well as my family history through material culture and processes. This process brings forward for consideration the performance of gender through textile production, textiles as a site of empowerment, textiles as a politics of situated knowledge, and radical empathy accessed through the production of textiles. Textiles, and the production methods that produce them, are multigenerational, passed down through a maternal lineage that spans back millennia. Due to this matrilineality, textiles become a site for the performance of femininity as well as a process steeped in memory and, in my experience, nostalgia. The textiles themselves become a document of this performance, encoded with the thoughts, stories, and histories of their makers. In the past, the pose of a figure at work on textiles has been understood as the pose of a subjugated body—bowed head, silently confined to the home and pushed to the margins. However, like Rozsika Parker before me, I posit that the woman at work has access to psychological independence and, therefore, power. Through the performance of politics and social media networked affect, the creation of textiles, while representing the patriarchal constraints of femininity, also acts as a source of empowerment and situated knowledge creation for textile makers. The practice of making textiles gives insight into the lived realities and intellectual and emotional lives of textile
makers situated across time and culture.