Redressing the Homeland: Textiles and Feminism in Palestinian Diasporic Art

This article explores how Palestinian mixed-media artists in the diaspora have been employing textiles to renegotiate meanings attached to the female body in the national aesthetic-political imagination. Bringing a decolonial feminism native to Palestine to bear on an analysis of artworks by Laila Shawa and Dana Barqawi, we propose textiles as a route to understanding how women artists creatively engage with themes of gender, labor, and land at the core of the Palestinian struggle. Arguing that textiles can articulate a political relation, we highlight affective modes of seeing and sensing that center Palestinian women's material-corporeal experience, but also consider the dilemmas involved in building a Palestinian feminist aesthetics outside decolonial frameworks. Working across different genres and espousing a distinct understanding of "resistance" and "feminism," contemporary diasporic artists use visual motifs and material practices to recode the woman-textile nexus and ultimately propose a vision of Palestinian liberation informed by a more expansive sense of gendered, sexual, and national belonging. Textiles emerge as both a rich material and an analytic in the refiguration of a Palestinian feminist imaginary that unsettles attempts by the Israeli state and the Palestinian Authority to govern women's bodies.