부산대학교 도서관

In Holloway Prison in March 1909, in an astonishing act of bodily harm, the suffragette Constance Lytton punctured the membrane of her skin with two needles and a hairpin in order to inscribe the words "Votes for Women" across her skin-body. She used her own skin as the ground cloth for the inscription, and needles, hairpin, skin, body, cloth and pain were all implicated in the act. Instead of using the needle to work cloth, Lytton used it to probe the boundary of her skin-body. Skin became a projected cloth where she materially wrought and discursively wrote the beginnings of a visceral and political suffrage message, demonstrating that her quasi-"cloth-skin-body" was a political site and the locus of trauma. Whilst Lytton did not leave any tangible evidence of hand-embroidering through cloth in Holloway, several suffragette embroideries worked there between 1911 and 1912 have survived. Hundreds of women were imprisoned at this time as the militant Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) turned to breaking windows and the destruction of property. They faced the threat of the hunger strike and forcible feeding. In this paper the relationship between trauma and embroidering through the "cloth-skin-body" is explored with reference to six suffragette embroideries. Leaning on the psychoanalytical writings of Didier Anzieu, Nicola Diamond and Stella North, as well as drawing on my own practice as research, I argue that for imprisoned suffragettes embroidering was autobiographic, situated and embodied. The paper proposes the concept of a "cloth-ego," which can be psychically projected from the body: hyphenated in its proximity to skin and the body but abstracted and expanded into the world as an embroidered handkerchief, tablecloth, bag or panel. For suffragettes such as the embroiderer Janie Terrero, who registered her own forcible feeding and that of nineteen others on a cloth panel, I argue that embroidering through the cloth-skin-body helped to psychically re-make and repair the self and filter and expel the toxic and invasive "spine in the flesh."1 Through the "procedural enactments"2 of embroidering, I claim that the women processed their somatic and affective experiences. The material practice of embroidering allowed their "absent present"3 bodies to "speak." It enabled the body to tell a material story above and beyond the discursive limits of language, beyond the words and images on the cloth. Thus, a story could be articulated before words were found or before feelings were put into consciousness, thought or speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]