Bordados

The embroidery is a form of text that goes beyond the linguistic realm. It may include words, but also images, colors, textures, and mixed materials. As a traditional activity practiced mostly by women, embroidery has often been considered a leisure practice, resulting in an ornament, a private and individual activity related to a particular view of the feminine (Pérez-Bustos, 2019). However, in the Latin American context, the textile practices are also connected to precolonial times, with storytelling textile artifacts such as quipus (Ascher & Ascher, 1975). In its etymological origins, the idea of knitting (tejido) comes from the Latin textus, which implied the knitting of a story, a tejido (Pérez-Bustos et al., 2016). This form of storytelling and meaning making entails practices that have always existed, although they are often not reappropriated in spaces outside of pure leisure. In the Chilean context, embroidery of burlaps is an example of embroidery outside the private, leisure-only sphere. This practice gained political relevance as a testimony of human rights violations during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (Shayne, 2009). These previous forms of embroidery with political ends influence the most current practice, which has become an emblem of the social revolution in Chile, started in 2019. We state that embroidery, as a practice and as an object itself is, therefore, a recontextualization inserted in the previous history of embroidery and a multimodal way of meaning making (Van Leeuwen, 2008).

In this book chapter, and drawing on multimodal semiotic discourse analysis and feminist theories, we will explore how embroidery has become a collective feminist practice of resistance. We will examine embroidery as a process of multimodal semiotic action of recontextualization, collectivization, transformative imaginary, active sociopolitical participation, and social critique. Focusing on the Chilean case, we will describe how contemporary bordadoras have used embroidery as a resource for meaning making to mobilize a specific resistance agenda. More specifically, we argue that by using embroidery for exposing social injustice and violence, a tradition of meaning making is being resignified through a social network platform. In this case, we present and analyze the embroideries of an Instagram account (@bordasu-sojos) that is explicitly political, feminist, and collective. The Instagram post adds a new layer of meaning, as it is accompanied by a written post, and a new level of visibility produced by the exposition on a massive platform. Through its posting on Instagram, the embroidery, often a private and individual object, becomes public and collective, offering new opportunities for advancing a Chilean and Latin American feminist agenda.