During my junior year of college, I created a feminist toolkit for feminist futures in my feminist theory class with Professor Betty Bayer. My classmates Rose Lippman, Izzy Boone, Liza Kiernan, and I worked together to create something that would draw on feminists' work, and propel such feminist agendas into the future. 

 

While we engaged with class readings during the beginning of our feminist theory course, I was moved by the methodological approaches that feminists have taken up to invoke change. In Brittney C. Cooper’s Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, Cooper draws on black women’s intellectual history in order to demonstrate that history is now; that it is still organizing and moving forward. Through her intellectual contribution, she carves out a space for black women by indicating and opposing their epistemic erasure. Her work is shown to be an active form of resistance, a form of activism that I had never considered before. 

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I was inspired by Cooper’s activation of history into the present day, and I wanted my feminist toolkit to do something similar. I chose to focus on sexual assault because of its rich history that persists through the present day. Although many activist groups such as #MeToo and #TimesUp have greatly influenced a positive difference in how society views sexual assault, there is still much work to be done. As I had learned from Kate Manne in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, madness and violence towards women is not psychological; prejudice is taught, cultured, and internalized through the system of misogyny. This system is deeply powerful and insidious. Above all, I wanted my toolkit to resist this system by making silenced voices heard. Listening to marginalized voices is a powerful means of disrupting normative misogynistic culture. I wanted to create something that transformed voices into action. 

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My desire to create a quilt was influenced by the film !W.a.r. : !Women Art Revolution. I learned that feminists had created a new kind of art to counter the art world that they were excluded and made invisible in. These feminists participated in consciousness raising by creating report cards to track the progress of museums’ inclusion of non-white and non-male artists. By creating a quilt, I hoped to extend these feminists’ project by engaging in consciousness raising and bringing visibility to the value of women’s artwork. My group and I decided that we wanted to artistically represent the words of people’s experiences with sexual assault and harassment to “use ‘the politics of everyday life’ to cultivate new historical knowledge and political consciousness” (Stone-Mediatore, 2016, 935). In doing so, we aimed to use consciousness raising as a means of showing that the personal is the political.   

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In making a quilt, I was also aware of the way that feminists have challenged the white masculine Western canon that has dominated art history. Not only have white Western men excluded women from the art world, as mentioned above, their sexist depictions of women and its  “... consumption [as] ‘great’ art [has] trained viewers to adopt the ‘male gaze’” (Wanzo, 2016, 657). Through art, our quilt had, and continues to have, the ability to disrupt the harmful consequences of the art historical narrative, while carving out a space for women and other marginalized persons to represent themselves. Art has the potential to transform how we view the world: "[d]espite claims that the study of representation holds little importance given what happens in the ‘real’ world, the terrain of representation is very much about real things-- what we see and long for, what we give into and resist” (Wanzo, 2016, 669). Ultimately, our quilt joins the complex battle over agency and power which is the heart of feminist struggles to redress inequality.  

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For the creation of our quilt, we chose to gather people’s direct and/or indirect experiences with sexual assault and sexual harassment from HWS and the larger Geneva community. Targeting college institutions was an important starting point because most colleges sweep acts of sexual assault and sexual harassment under the rug to avoid being known for having unsafe campuses; they prioritize their reputation over student’s safety. As a result, many people do not think that sexual assault and sexual harassment happen so frequently. We challenged this notion by listening to people’s experiences and making them visible. By focusing on expression, we also undermined the belief that emotions do not say anything real about the world. On the contrary, we cast marginalized group members as credible knowers, as feeling is an important vehicle of knowledge production (Hawkesworth & Disch, 2016, 7). 

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In order to gather people’s direct and/or indirect experiences with sexual assault and harassment, we put four shoe boxes in various locations. We wrapped these boxes in fabric to draw attention to our quilt project, alongside a poster which explained what our quilt project aimed to do, and how people could further participate. Each box had a small slit centered on the top so that people could privately submit a card --which we provided next to the boxes-- with their direct and/or indirect experience with sexual assault and harassment. The poster provided one of our group member’s contact information if they wished to reach out for information, conversation, or participation in the making of our quilt. For two weeks we moved boxes around single-stall bathrooms in common and diverse places on the HWS campus (Demarest, Stern, Scandling, the Gearan Center, Intercultural Affairs, and Chi Phi), as well as local locations in Geneva (Bagels n Cakes and Monaco’s), so that we could gather responses from as many people as possible. We chose to put our boxes in single-stall bathrooms to respect the privacy, fragility, and immensity of people’s direct and/or indirect experiences with sexual assault and harassment. 

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While we waited for people to provide their experiences, we started to create our quilt. We visited a local quilting store in Geneva, Quilty Pleasures, in order to get the materials that we would need to sew a quilt together. Since none of us had much experience sewing a quilt, we reached out to Professor Blanchard who guided us through the process. We cut out 10x10 squares of fabric, as recommended by Professor Blanchard, and then we sewed the patches together based on the technique that she had taught us. In order to finalize our quilt, we returned to Quilty Pleasures. The owner, Val, advised us to put a backing on our quilt and helped us to do so. We ironed the quilt, then used a ruler to line the edges so that we could cut our quilt and make it more symmetrical. After, we measured our quilt and used a fabric that was a little bit bigger in size for the backing. We pinned together our patches and the fabric backing to ensure that its positionality would not move when we used a sewing machine to sew them together. When we finished using the sewing machine, we turned the quilt inside out, manually sewed each corner of the patches to the backing, and were finally able to see its final product. This was an especially exciting time for me because I had not imagined that I would be able to create a good-looking quilt with the absolute inexperience that I had formerly had! I not only saw how learning may lead to innovation, but I came to recognize the power of collaborative work. 

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Once our quilt was done, and all of our words had been collected, we had to decide how the words would be displayed on the quilt, and which words we were going to use. We had received about 50 expressions, and ended up choosing the ones that were most commonly repeated and that were the most powerful. After talking to Laura, we also decided that we did not want our quilt to solely be composed of negative experiences, showcasing no hope. We came up with our own words and phrases to include that would propel us into the future. I think that this decision was crucial to our feminist toolkit: we drew on tools from former feminists while providing our own words/tools for feminist futures. Similarly to Cooper, our quilt shows that history is now and that it is still organizing and moving forward. We drafted our words on pictures of the quilt so that we could visually display them effectively. 

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Figuring out how to display our words was one of the hardest parts of our feminist toolkit. We acknowledged that our quilt would be a feminist art piece, and therefore, we needed an art historian’s perspective. Since Angelique is an art historian, specialized in the ways that gender has been displayed throughout history, we sought out her advice. She recommended that we stick to a pattern, and I decided that we would fill up four squares for each row so that the quilt was not overwhelmed with words. Angelique also recommended that we cut out words in felt and use fabric glue to glue them on, or that we use fabric paint. It was important that we did not use stencils or anything that made our words appear perfectly constant, as we wanted to demonstrate the individuality of our, and of the words that we had collected. 

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I ultimately decided that the positive words that we had come up with would be displayed in yellow felt to embolden them and to show the unison between them. I also glued abstract fabric onto the felt of these words to further highlight their significance. I did not do this work alone; my mother, my sister, and many of my friends helped me through this durational process. They also helped me paint on the words that had been collected of the direct and/or indirect experiences of sexual assault and harassment. Ultimately, the placement of these words were chosen based on the colors of the patches that we thought they best represented, and the color of the words were chosen based on what colors made them most visible against the colored patches. I also sought out the help of one of my mother’s friends who is an expert embroiderer because I thought that at least one of the words should be embroidered. She taught me how to embroider, but also skillfully added beads to the word “vulnerable” to make it pop out, as this was one of the most repeated words that my group had collected from our boxes. Through this process, I learned how to participate in the physical mode of making-- craft-- and those who helped me engaged in the same durational and repetitive labor that has historically been performed by women. The application of gendered labor in our toolkit, as well as the incorporation of collaborative feminist practice, promoted the agency and voices of marginalized persons. 

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 Even so, our feminist toolkit had many weaknesses. For one, the center square of our quilt was supposed to list important activists so that we honored their contributions, and so that viewers could see that their activist work was central to the work that we had done. We also failed to create an Instagram, or another platform on social media. Moving our feminist toolkit into public culture by utilizing the power of social media could have engaged more conversation, participation, and action in the future: “[n]o medium has offered the utopian possibilities of resistance as much as new media” (Wanzo, 2016, 668). Additionally, we failed to focus on intersectionality even though we understood the necessity of an intersectional approach after reading Amplify: Graphic Narratives of Feminist Resistance. Feminist activism depends upon group relationships and collective imagination but must encompass a process of relation-building that recognizes the interconnectedness of oppressive systems (Bowman, Braem, & Hui, 2019, 159). Unfortunately, our feminist toolkit did not address how experiences of sexual assault and harassment vary depending on group differences, which is fairly problematic. In order to construct a toolkit for feminist futures, we must address a future that is possible for various individuals. 

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Overall, I think that our feminist toolkit could have been more inclusive, but I also believe that this acknowledgement is what transforms feminism over time. Although it is hard to address EVERY intersectional position, it is important to acknowledge your own positionality within oppressive systems, and to wield it in a way that provokes conversation instead of silencing it. Our quilt will be donated to the feminist organization “The Monument Quilt,” and will hopefully inspire people, as well as, provoke conversations that we may learn from.    

                                                        Works Cited

Bowman, Norah, Meg Braem & Dominique Hui. Amplify: Graphic Narratives of Feminist 

    Resistance. University of Toronto Press, 2019.

Cooper, Brittney C. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. University 

     of Illinois Press., 2017.

Manne, Kate. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press, 2019.

Stone-Mediatore, Shari. “Storytelling/Narrative.” The Handbook of Feminist Theory, by Lisa 

     Disch and Mary E. Hawkesworth, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 934–954.

Wanzo, Rebecca. “Pop Culture/Visual Culture.” The Handbook of Feminist Theory, by Lisa 

     Disch and Mary E. Hawkesworth, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 651–672.

!W.a.r. : !Women Art Revolution. Directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Hotwire Productions, and 

     Zeitgeist Films. Zeitgeist Films, 2012. DVD.