Authors
TEREZA JIROUTOVA KYNCLOVA1; 1 Charles University, Faculty of Humanities, Czech Republic Discussion
The intersection of creativity in textile production and literary theory is a topic that may inform the postsocialist context by drawing on decolonial thought. Feminist criticism has exposed the ways in which weaving and textile production have historically relied on domesticity and its socio-cultural association with femininity. Textual readings of textiles as proposed by decolonial theories can expand traditional understanding of women’s authorship, creativity, and literary history also in post-socialist contexts. The counterhegemonic intersections of both the decolonial and the postsocialist condition are manifest in Anetta M. Chisa and Lucia Tkáčová’s crocheted tablecloth When Labour Becomes Form in The Gallery of Modern Art, Hradec Králové. The piece, a crocheted tablecloth in the form of a statistical graph, both IS and TELLS the story of how age correlates with women’s unemployment. Creativity is used here to address institutional inequalities. The paper aims to locate textile artifacts such as the one mentioned and analyze 1) how marginalized subjects achieve modes of (self) representation by the combination of textile and the textual, 2) how textile production and its cultural representation pertain to genres in which femininities and masculinities are portrayed, interpreted and performed, 3) and what intersectional connections there are in the liminal spaces between postsocialist and decolonial theories of self-representation. 
