Frayed & Fraying: textile actions and the edges of belonging

To think of transnational belonging in terms of female agency is to think of the capacity of feminist practices or the practices of feminism to function across geopolitical boundaries and structures. In this essay I take the notion of frayed and fraying edges and centres as a form of spatial logic by which to renegotiate a gendered performance of these boundaries starting from Hannah Arendt’s ‘enlarged mentality’ (1982, p. 43), a form of thinking that is bound up with visiting with. Such a logic, like the woven textile, privileges relationship, the with, setting the performance of self within the space of the other not in place of that other. The fray and fraying as form and action offer scope by which to think through the concepts at the heart of this book: female agency and transnational belonging. To open out the concept of textile as a spatial logic of frayed and fraying, this essay winds itself around the practice of two artists: Billie Zangewa and Zina Katz. Both artists work figuratively with found fabrics and stitch, taking a patching and piecing set of techniques as a means by which to articulate themes of belonging and self-identity. I want to suggest that fraying is a form of visual activism that strategically puts pressure on structures of belonging and the intimate edges of the global communities.