The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine

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This new edition of The Subversive Stitch brings the book up to date with exploration of the stitched art of Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, as well as the work of new young female and male embroiderers. UR - https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Queering_the_Subversive_Stitch.html?id=XeEWswEACAAJ&redir_esc=y McBrinn’s aim, to redress the absence of documentation about male needleworkers, draws attention to the men who choose needlework as a hobby or creative pastime for its pleasure, satisfaction or medium-for-a-message. His interest is not in Savile Row tailors, male garment factory workers, sailors occupying themselves at sea or male members of embroidery guilds before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. These occupations carry no sexual stigma. Instead, by identifying male practitioners and recovering their work, McBrinn deftly reminds readers, by means of needlework, that “the social construction of masculinity – [is] something that only really exists in relation to femininity” (xvii). This means that a boy or man who prefers stitching over rugby or boxing is stigmatized as effeminate (having or showing characteristics regarded as typical of a woman), queer (not normal), “sissies or ‘fags’” (108). By coincidence, one of the definitions of faggot, from which “fag” derives, in the Oxford English Dictionary is “an embroidered or painted figure of a faggot, which people regarded as heretics … were obliged to wear on their sleeve.” In other words, a stitched emblem.

The Subversive Stitch Embroidery | PDF - Scribd PARKER, R. - The Subversive Stitch Embroidery | PDF - Scribd

It's a VERY white history of English stitchwork by merchant class and royal women and men, with far too much emphasis on the church and religious imagery. Barely any discussion of the actual work of embroidery, materials used, or anything "subversive" until the chapters set mostly in the 1970s. The "updated" forward mentions a few newer artists, but doesn't discuss the specifics of their work with any meaningful detail. And as far as feminist content - lots about how women were subjugated or uncredited as stitchers, and as subjects of pictorial works, but nothing about overcoming any of that. The role of embroidery in the construction of femininity has undoubtedly constricted the development of the art. What women depicted in thread became determined by notions of femininity, and the resulting femininity of embroidery defined and constructed its practitioners in its own image. However, the vicious circle has never been complete. Limited to practising art with needle and thread, women have nevertheless sewn a subversive stitch - managed to make meanings of their own in the very medium intended to inculcate self-effacement. Softness of form and colour in the wall-mounted collage of carpet offcuts by Bea Bonafini are inspired the Neolithic cave paintings found in the Sicilian island of Levanzo. The intertwined forms of ‘Shape Shifting V’ move concentrically and from human to animal, recalling the urgency of hunting scenes and spiritual imagery painted on walls in the darkness of hidden cave chambers. The use of carpet being transferred to the wall and hung as an artwork also challenges the expected use and display of an everyday, functional material.Tate Modern’s recent Anni Albers (1899-1994) exhibition, curated by Ann Coxon and Briony Fer, demonstrated Albers’ role as an important artist in Modernism through her weavings, which she began in the 1920s Bauhaus workshops and developed through her exposure to ancient Latin American weavings once she moved to the US in the 1930s. These early civilization weavings and textiles that Albers immersed herself in can be seen as a form of communication, coding and language. Lilah Fowler, who is interested in our geopolitical space within today’s digital culture, worked with a computer programmer to produce custom software that created unlimited and unique digital patterns. Learning the technique of Navajo weaving, she first created hand-woven rugs from the digital information of hundreds of generated patterns, and then used a digital Jacquard loom. Early looms were often seen as early computers, in the way they read information to weave designs via holes punched in cards. The research is really interesting, returning to primary sources, no relying on Victorian writers (who often made up things - yes they did!!). The writing is let down by repetition and a bit of rambling, a tighter edit would have been good. The illustrations are relevant but the quality lets them down. Garland is a partner of World Crafts Council – Australia, a national entity of the World Crafts Council – Asia Pacific. This book tells the history of embroidery. It shows how useful embroidery is to get to know the history of women or how similar it remains to other art forms such as painting. Rozsika Parker, “The Domestication of Embroidery.” in The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 60-82.

the Subversive Stitch: Sew very masculine! Queering the Subversive Stitch: Sew very masculine!

Marianne Thoermer’s jumbo threads spill out of the knotted field like a stream of colour bridging the boundaries of installation, sculpture and painting. At times the shaggy surface connotes a bacterial outgrowth colonizing the expanse. It reminds us of the contents of a petri dish - a microscopic world amplified to extended proportions, spilling and leaking out. As well as providing an interesting and well-researched history of embroidery, this book made me question my own relationship to embroidery. I loved embroidery when I was younger, and "wasted" very many hours making quite "useless", but beautiful items. Was it because I saw embroidery as a "ladylike, romantic ideal"? Yes, indeed. Did it stop me from developing a richer intellect? No, because unlike earlier generations, I was taught more than needlework at school. I think that the questions raised by this book about embroidery as art or foolish hobby remain highly relevant and worth continuing to question. There remains in popular culture a thread of the old-fashioned Victorian era image of someone to "sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam", that embroidery struggles to overcome. I will be thinking about this for a long time yet.The history of men’s needlework has long been considered a taboo subject. This is the first book ever published to document and critically interrogate a range of needlework made by men. It reveals that since medieval times men have threaded their own needles, stitched and knitted, woven lace, handmade clothes, as well as other kinds of textiles, and generally delighted in the pleasures and possibilities offered by all sorts of needlework. Only since the dawn of the modern age, in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, did needlework become closely aligned with new ideologies of the feminine. Since then men’s needlework has been read not just as feminising but as queer.