Valerie Navarrete

Warping - Creating even tension by winding thread in a figure eight, oscillating around two posts, intersecting at a cross in the middle.

At a recent research visit, Kate Irvin, textile curator at the RISD museum, arranged a selection of Mexican weavings donated in the early 1900s. Of all the tapestries, the smallest and most worn piece demanded my attention. I picked it up with latex gloves, and like a baby with a heavy head, its top half flopped over behind its back. Overarching white beams exposed every fiber of the piece and prompted a medicalized reading that washed out any record of artistry. Strewn across the examination table, with no identification or origin, this piece was the only fragment we had to represent a breathing but nameless body. Treating weaving as a site for both creation and destruction, Julia Bryan Wilson fixates on “the material wearing out of textiles, the undoing of threads, the pulling apart of fibers through strain and repeated use.” Within its destruction, “edges—or borders-–become more prone to fray as they are subject to friction.” This is all to say, generations of movement and internalized tension cause a weaving to unravel, despite the illusion of timeless strength granted to a tapestry’s warp. All at once, the scientist part of my brain switches vision, I begin to see weaving through the biological semiotics of skin.

Picking - Insertion of weft through the passage created.

What does it mean to feel betrayed by your own body? Medically speaking, the body is always betraying itself. Aging, autoimmunity, cancer. These are all common examples of attacks of oneself, by oneself. But there is a specific root of self-sabotage that I would like to probe further—the inability of language to substantiate a self that we identify with.

José Esteban Muñoz describes this frustration through a series of demands that prevent the body from sitting comfortably in its skin; a process where “identities-in-difference emerge from a failed interpellation within the dominant public sphere.” Interpellation, as a diametric pressure at the internal-external interface, creates an imaginary boundary for one to teeter between two conflicting realities: the secret depths of the self, and the white-washed version of the Other. As one grows, the pressure becomes more palpable. The body may fail to fit seamlessly, but the self is trained to pick and choose which attributes to surrender—or more accurately, forced to surrender. Moving in silence, even a glimpse at a reflection in the mirror, or a melt into a shadow on the sidewalk create space for peaceful disassociation. But once returning to the body, it is fair to ask: why does it all have to be so contained?

In Margarita Coda Cardenas’ Puppet, sociopolitical conflict bleeds into the inner conflict of protagonist Petra’s identity crisis. Rather than feeling like a self-actualized person with autonomy, Petra realizes she is merely a reflection, an image originating from the sociopolitical environment that she inhabits. She begins to recount critical moments in Mexican history, at one point experiencing an identity crisis during a history lesson on Spanish conquest. She repeats the question with one of her selves, asking, “ARE YOU MALINCHE MALINCHI? WHO ARE YOU? WHO AM I MALINCHI?”

If we probe the history of hysteria, we notice a pathological manifestation that, at its most radical expression, represents a disease of being locked in one’s skin, dealing with the contradictions between oneself and the expectations of the outside. Prior dominant frameworks have conceptualized one’s psychology through degrees of consciousness, compartmentalizing modes of lucidity without fully acknowledging the transience in between. That is all to say, moments of the experiential might flow into a repressed unconscious, but as this container fills to the brim, psychoanalytic language fails to register visible symptoms as signs of social malady.

Like Petra suggests in her identity crisis, Frida Gorbach proposes that colonial hegemony must serve as a precursor to feminine excess, that “the feminine [only] appears when the coherence of medical discourse is ruptured and when, to explain the illness, the doctors stop attempting to define it.” Contrary to the Western canonization of trauma studies, Gorbach uses clinical records from late 19th century Mexico to reposition hysteria as a byproduct of much deeper, colonial roots. Traditionally, Western physicians hypothesized that hysteria was a disease of women, caused by a migratory microbial between the uterus and the brain. In retrospect, they were correct to mobilize the ailment, but wrong for enclosing the journey within the body.

Many Mexican psychiatrists grew weary of this diagnosis and suspected the ailment must originate from the outside, perhaps even stemming from the sociopolitical climate of their patients. Psychiatrists such as Dr. Jose Galindo, Dr. Demetrio Mejía, and Dr. Fernando Malanco, shifted their exploration “from the search for physical wounds to the influence of exterior factors on the nervous system.” In a broader sense, this transition was emblematic of a more important shift in medical epistemology from “a preoccupation with the individual body to the relationship between body and environment.” This transition was even evident in symptom language, where terms like “over-civilization” were used to diagnose hysteria by physicians who blamed the social pressures of modernity for hysterical outbreaks.

While it might be easy to blame modernity for the emergence of hysteria, it is more difficult to define what modernity actually is. What are the implications? What is the physiological collateral? This is the only way to begin pathologizing figments of the historical imagination. 

Sadly, the inability to expand personhood beyond boundaries of cultural normalcy is a rebuke of knowledge (conscious or not) that remains untranslatable. For this reason, Negrete observes the same leakage between private and public barriers, where trauma escapes through physical changes in the body. When considering the release of this pressure, Negrete introduces the term, “sublimation,” to describe the psychological journey of unprocessed information that originates in the body and eventually leaks out. Resulting from the sublimation process, repressed, nameless energy materializes as a visible trace of emotions.

While I believe the hysteric framework helps to consider colonial trauma as a pathology seeping through a porous body; as a scientist, I am also interested in pursuing the material traces. In a landscape of data, science relies on the presumption that everything is capturable. Legitimized through intense data recognition, the world we inhabit becomes ruled by a very specific materiality of evidence—one that texturizes what is already seen. Studies that correlate discrimination and health status is one example of this. On one hand, there is value in translating discrimination through a set of numerics, for it compartmentalizes large meaning to a readable magnitude of good and bad. But in loops of talking more about the fact of the thing, scientists are roped into the political ideation of racial and gendered identities, solidifying the differences by asserting them as impenetrable truths. If we interrogate the delay in breaking this model, the issue is not the inability to feel empathy, but the stakes of legitimizing the agony of others as a form of evidence in itself.

To contextualize, femicide, or the murder of women for being women, is a contemporary issue that has been addressed by at least 17 Latin American countries. The murder of women is differentiated from other homicides because all femicides are intimate, premeditated.

The downtown area of Ciudad Juárez contains a bus connection between the east and the west sides, an infamously precarious transitional area where numerous women have been found dead or missing. Unfortunately, with the onset of workers shuffling in, the violent realities of the border city remained. Although the statistics of overall homicides have been decreasing over the years, the percentage of female victims has been on the rise since the 1990s. With maquiladoras profiting heavily off cheap labor, and the supply of cheap labor remaining unquestionably high, there has never been an interest to enforce safety conditions for female workers.

To specify worker rights from female worker rights, I argue that the weaponization of feminine sexuality represents a separate metamorphosis of the worker’s body. She is not just dispensable, but she is immoral. Consequently, there is a tendency to superimpose blame onto the victims for the sake of mopping blood spills in the factory. Scapegoating to this degree is proof that there is a tactile materialization of embodied political knowledge and affect. This is where the language of textiles, and its parallels to skin and femininity, are particularly useful. Like Julia Skelly, Claire Pajaczkowska writes on the traces of touch in textiles, and how thinking in semiotics of tactility—even excessive tactility—can give representational currency to otherwise unnamable violence.