Telling Trauma: Resisting through Embroidery Stories

Abstract

As a contemporary mode of subversion, the art of needlework has been revived from the category of the merely “aesthetic” to the expansive category of the “powerful.” Freestyle hand embroidery enables the socially disabled women of South Asia and other regions of the world to vent their trauma within the walls of their households. The select set of embroideries displayed here is expressionistic in art-style, presenting three micro-stories on bride burning, female foeticide, and Eve-teasing, as part of my personal project named “Embroidery Stories.”