Textile Healing – Feminist Resistance Against Sexualized Violence and Femicides Through Activist Art

Abstract The public display of textile activist art generates visibility and attention. The artworks discussed in this paper are material signs of rebellion against sexualized violence against women/as women read persons and femicides. This article portrays feminist resistance to sexualized violence/femicides through critical crafting, which is (textile) craft-based activist art. This artistic practice makes invisible violence visible; or feminist phrased the private becomes the political. Textile crafting strategies place sexualized relations of violence to which women are exposed in patriarchally organized (industrial) cultures worldwide – that is, in both the global North and the global South – at the center of the discourse. The art-activists analyzed in this article are concerned with triple-binds that arise in the entanglement of racism, sexism and classism. The projects aim to make visible the situation of survivors of sexualized violence and the relatives of murdered women* and generate a sense of self-empowerment through the co-creation of agency for survivors. This paper asks what correlations arise when traditionally feminine textile crafts are charged with issues of sexualized violence and used as a display for gender-political protest in public space. Feminist art-activists from the collective Force: Upsetting Rape Culture take socio-critical positions with their work The Monument Quilt and try to undermine cultural narratives of gender stereotypes and the associated attributions. The Monument Quilt and its Mexican partner project La Casa Mandarina are textile mouthpieces, as they reflect a huge accumulation of voices in public space. This visual plurality combined with the signal color red of the individual textile parts acts as a metaphor for subjects who (re)conquer urban space loudly and clearly qua screaming red.