Textile Material Metaphors to Describe Feminist Textile Activisms: From Threading Yarn, to Knitting, to Weaving Politics

In this article, we present the continuum proposed by Anne Beth Pentney in 2008 as a way of describing feminist political action in the fiber arts, and discuss its limitations using three textile material metaphors. These metaphors evolve from an empirical analysis undertaken in Bogota, Colombia, of various textile initiatives in the public sphere. We first describe how the continuum proposed by Pentney is based on the textile image of a yarn spun out of three different threads. Secondly, we show the potentiality of knitting a standard pattern, which entangles the continuum, allowing us to understand the affective importance of collective encounters in any political textile action. Finally, we think of this continuum as a weaving textile in action, with broken and missing threads; this last metaphor allows us to think of modes of understanding textile activism which cannot be replicated or standardized but are also sustained by affective-material-embodied practices of labor and pedagogy.