The production of needlework and textiles depictis women’s primary entry point into material culture as a pivotal intersection where the social, political, economic, ethnic, and cultural facets of humanity are converged. The “world of the needle,” however, not only enhance the history of material cultures, but also the construction of gender and ethnic indistinctiveness, feminine culture, and evolution of consumer economies.
Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles emulate with Teresa de Lauretis’ “theory of culture with women as the main subject - not commodities, but social beings bringing forth and imitating cultural products, transmitting and transforming cultural values.”
For women of all stations in life and in all
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Parker’s historical study of gender and embroidery indicates and establishes how needlework became gendered under modernity; that is, it was build up as “women’s work,” undeterred by the fact that historically men have always plied a needle.
How Parker’s words, “As I cannot write” denote a stitching as non-writing.
In Parker’s view, we witness her crafting innovative huddle as she engages in painful inter dynamic intervention between her experience and the social expectation that define her role in society. Her custom and her piece ought to encourage material culture disciple and rhetoric historians to turn their scholarly gaze towards all sorts of material fashion that have taken place in the shadows—hidden, that is, in broad
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Over the past two decades, researchers inrhetoric, literary studies, history, and cultural studies, for example, have turnedto material culture studies to explore the significance of material artifacts andmaterial strategies for understanding history, culture, race, gender, politics,economics, literacy, and so on. This turn coincides, probably not coincidently,with a linguistic turn in disciplines such as anthropology and archaeology thathave long studied material culture. Bjornar Olsen traces this turn rst understructuralism, a sense that material culture could be read as a text, and thento the challenge of this view under post-structuralism that called for more afuid, process-oriented view of knowledge construction and an opening up ofwhat counts as