Dorcas legacies, Dorcas futures: Textile legacies and the formation of identities in ‘habitus’ spaces

Abstract

Feminist legacies of the handmade are visible through the rhetoric of the material archive. For a textile practitioner this might traditionally have been through the creation of the sampler, a physical display created to demonstrate the technical skill or creative prowess of the maker. The voices of hidden textile practices might also be revealed by oral stories and narratives, which lie dormant in newspaper listings and archives. Other textile legacies are embedded within the modes of transmission of knowledge contained within spaces or other ‘habitus’ that traditionally sit outside the boundaries of more traditional institutional spaces of textile learning. Textiles as objects hold meaning, are related to different aspects of memory and knowledge, and generate significance by and for different social, gendered and cultural groups globally. This article explores how Dorcas Clubs – a charitable organization of philanthropic women formed at the beginning of the nineteenth century – did this through the migratory experience of women, whether through notions of class boundary, physical space or travel. It is argued that Dorcas Societies, through their transformation,

Stitching Together: Participatory textile making as an emerging methodological approach to research

“…The impact and effectiveness of these works draws from the traditions of gathering people together to enable the making of large-scale textiles mentioned earlier. In this mould, with varied degrees of political or personal activism, stitching groups continue to represent ideas of community and identity, from 'The Knitting Map' of Cork, Ireland (Gilson & Moffat, 2019) to the Dorcas Clubs serving Caribbean migrant communities (Sinclair, 2015).…”

Introduction: Second-hand Cultures in Unsettled Times

“…Wellesley-Smith 2021;Wellesley-Smith and Kiff 2021), or, in the case of Dorcas Societies, as space of respite for Black women migrants to Britain from the Caribbean(Sinclair 2015;. Still another related strand of research and practice has turned to the teaching and sharing of skills of repair, in classrooms, the aforementioned community repair cafés, or other spaces, especially in considering what's next for second-hand futures (Findley, this issue;Bradley and Persson 2022).…”