Ghost-Stitching American Politics

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, feminist and online craft communities responded with a call to arms (or needles) aimed at resistance through collective action in thread, yarn, and textiles. One such project, Diana Weymar’s Tiny Pricks Project, records the incessant barrage of Trump’s media coverage: tweets, journalist reportage, and statements in stitched thread. Weymar started Tiny Pricks Project on 8 January 2018, stitching the 45th President’s bluster of a 6 January tweet, “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS”, in yellow thread across a field of tapestry flowers. Issuing an invitation for contributions from stitchers around the world, Weymar accrued a vast archive of over 5,000 individual textile works which transform political rhetoric into thread. Although the project has been exhibited in its material form in galleries around the United States (particularly in the lead-up to the 2020 election), its primary display is online, where the textured and tactile objects are imaged and uploaded to Instagram. Drawing on the associations of a medium associated with intimacy and femininity, @tinypricksproject traces Trump’s presidency, rejecting the immediacy of the 24-hour media cycle with careful, time-consuming stitching that bears the imprint of its makers. As an attempt to reshape Trump’s violent utterances as a material symbol of resistance, Tiny Pricks Project has a close parallel in the bright pink hand-knitted “pussyhats” that became the symbol of the 2017 Women’s March. With a pattern distributed online through platforms such as Ravelry and sold on online marketplaces such as Etsy, the Pussyhat Project exemplifies the ambitions of twentyfirst-century craftivism, that “creativity can be a catalyst for change” (Greer, 183), but also the neoliberal commodification of these ideals. The contested legacy of the Pussyhat Project, lauded as a means of participatory politics but criticised for the whiteness and transphobic essentialism of its chosen symbol, demonstrates the challenges in harnessing craft as collective activism (Black), and suggests the need for individualised, responsive ways of connecting politics and hand-making. The same phrase that inspired the Pussyhats, Trump’s recording of 2005 admitting sexual assault (“They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”) also appears across the Tiny Pricks Project as an embroidered text where it performs a very different role. In contrast to the performative use of knitted projects as a garment to wear in action, Weymar describes Tiny Pricks Project as a “stitched material record” and as “testimony”. Both acts, of stitching and posting, are acts of memory-making and communication, and as such, the cumulative posts of Tiny Pricks Project function as a feminist vernacular temporary memorial. Initially focussed exclusively on Trump, the project has expanded in both territory (with a dedicated Tiny Pricks Project UK) and politically to encompass direct statements of opposition. The intimacy and history of needlework in Tiny Pricks Project punctures distance, drawing the violence of Trump’s political rhetoric (against women, immigrants, the disabled, and the vulnerable) into a direct, affective contact with the bodies of stitchers and viewers. This article proposes the contact of Tiny Pricks Project as a form of haunting, where threads pierce through memories of the past and bodies in the present. Embroiderers have a term for stitching which follows a pattern from the other side – ghost stitching – allowing for the thread to create a pattern which is elsewhere but not visible, a tracing through to the inverse and across multiple layers of textile. To consider threads as conveying presence recognises the powerful affective charge of stitching. As Roszika Parker asserts in her influential work of feminist art history, The Subversive Stitch, “embroiderers … transform materials to produce sense” (6), making complex embodied meaning through thread and fabric. A digital ghost stitch, the tracing of online content in needlework that records the sense of its maker, which is then reposted elsewhere, draws out the affective quality of the material that “pricks” the user. Ghosts here are defined through the work of Avery Gordon, where they are “that special instance of the merging of the visible and the invisible, the dead and the living, the past and the present” (25). In their production of material effects, ghosts are the manifestation of haunting, which for Gordon is a particular form of mediation that breaks down distance: in haunting, organized forces and systemic structures that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way that confounds our analytic separations and confounds the social separations themselves. (19) A ghost stitch, then, is the specific quality of stitched thread in a digital post to puncture mediatised politics, drawing together otherwise invisible bodies and histories. To draw out the haunted nature of thread this article locates the affective quality of the stitched politics of Tiny Pricks Project in the context of contemporary memorial cultures, rather than the field of craftivism or digital activism. Focussing on the histories and politics of needlework, I begin by understanding the material use of thread and stitching in Tiny Pricks Project as a connection to intimate forms of memory-making, specifically American traditions of quilting. I then locate the specific form of @tinypricksproject, cumulative posts on Instagram in response and reaction to historical events, as a form of vernacular memorial that punctures the screen with the presence of stitchers, framing this discussion in relationship to new forms of public memory-making in both public spaces and online. Finally, I consider the combination of these forms, threaded stitches and digital memorials, as a “ghost stitch” that “pricks” me when I scroll through the feed, forcing an embodied relationship with its haunted political texts.   The stitched thread has a powerful emotional charge that intimately traces the body, through the gestural mark of a hand, and evokes memory, through a connection to family heirlooms and domestic material culture. This nostalgic embodiment is exploited in the material form of Tiny Pricks Project, where Trump’s words in are stitched into vintage textiles, such as lace-edged napkins or printed children’s handkerchiefs, each carrying sentimental associations. Items of clothing sometimes appear as the support – as Trump’s response to the 2019 Senate inquiry that “I did nothing wrong” stitched in red on the front of a child’s dress decorated with red, white, and blue ric-rac and stars. The technical skill on display varies across the project, but most text is rendered in simple back stitch, creating a punctuated and punctured line that wobbles and reveals its handmade quality. Weymar’s own hand is evident in the use of bold, block lettering, often layered over tapestry – such in a repeat of “I AM A VERY STABLE GENIUS” in blue and yellow thread stitched over a stag tapestry by her grandmother. Some have the addition of more elaborative embroidered imagery or applique in the form of anachronistic illustrations and decorative motifs. Whilst information on individual panels (the stitcher, the source of the quote, and sometimes an account of the work’s production) is available in the Instagram caption in the feed and tag, each individual painstakingly stitched post is understood in relationship to the surrounding images. The combination of the individual panels of repurposed fabric of Tiny Pricks Project evokes the iconic American form of the patchwork quilt that pieces together textiles with their own histories and memories to make new form that is both fragmented and connected. On @tinyprickproject the visual similarity to a quilt is striking, as an image of each textile panel is joined to the next via Instagram’s gridded interface. In the individualised feeds of the account’s followers, each Tiny Pricks Project post is stitched together with other algorithmically selected images, generating a unique piecing together of politics with the personal, as a digital quilt. Although the image of quilting in the popular imagination remains dominated by images of white femininity (as in the 1996 film How to Make an American Quilt), quilts have historically also been a site of expression and memory-making for bodies otherwise effaced in American culture. The tradition of Black quilting, for example, has a complicated history, as bell hooks describes, where quilts were produced out of basic material need but were also a powerful form of aesthetic expression. Remembering her grandmother’s quilting, hooks identifies the way that the reuse of the family’s tattered and worn clothing in crazy quilts results in “bits and pieces of my mama’s life, held and contained there” (121). Peter Stallybrass similarly articulates the powerful communication of presence and absence of using worn garments for quilting, where “a network of cloth can trace the connection of love across the boundaries of absence, of death, because cloth is able to carry the absent body, memory, genealogy” (36-37). In their material and form, quilts have a powerful connection to memories outside dominant narratives as an assertion of the bodies who laboured on them, those bodies whose worn garments have been transformed into pattern, and the bodies they symbolically cover. This quality of intimacy, memory, and embodiment has a political potentiality, as exploited in the cumulative, community NAMES project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Founded by Cleve Jones and first displayed in 1987 in Washington D.C., each individual panel approximates the size of a body (or coffin) and is stitched with the name and memory of someone lost in the AIDS crisis. In its public display through the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the panels spread out on the ground in public spaces, A