Handwork as a political act through a feminist lens
Project idea
Handwork as a Political Act Through a Feminist Lens offers a contribution to interdisciplinary research by bridging feminist political theory with contemporary artistic practice. Its aim is to establish an academic framework in which textile-based handwork—historically excluded from political discourse—is repositioned as a critical method for expressing political participation and collective solidarity.
The research is timely in the Lithuanian academic and cultural context, where such a methodological approach has not been explored. It offers a structured opportunity to expand an arts-based academic trajectory into the field of political science, legitimizing the topic both institutionally and methodologically as an embodied form of political engagement and intergenerational memory.
The postdoctoral project engages in dialogue with feminist theorists of labor and knowledge – Mincyte, Federici, as well as contemporary art historians like Majewska-Güde, Skelly, Smith, who explore the marginalization of textile practices.
The research examines manual practices as feminist and political acts by Lithuanian women artists. These practices, including the researcher’s own, have not been studied through this lens before. The research aims to enrich Lithuanian artistic and academic discourse by positioning handwork as a form of gentle activism, a political gesture, and a tool for feminist and political rethinking and praxis.
The research builds upon the fellow’s prior work with the artist duo HANDWORK, which realized projects such as Stitching the Flag (2020), in support of the Belarusian pro-democracy movement, and Stitching the Poetry (2022–ongoing), a collective embroidery of wartime poetry written by Ukrainian women. These works have demonstrated the potential of textile to serve as a material platform for collective resilience, and feminist solidarity.
The project redefines handwork as a feminist method of political thought—tactile and transformative.
