HoW i design squares

The process of designing and making a square begins with choosing the story I want to tell. (So far, I have first learned most of the stories by following Jessica Valenti’s newsletter, Abortion, Every Day or reading the website Abortion in America.) As I research the story, I take note of details that stick with me. Then I write the story to emphasize those details and any elements of the story that highlight injustice and suffering. That research and writing process usually crystallizes for me the basic design of the square. Then, it’s a matter of deciding how to render the design in my materials, mainly fabric and thread, but I’ve also used beads, paper, plastic, and in the case of the Texas flag, segments from a necklace chain. To me, the most vivid and egregious elements of the story of Texas midwife Maria Margarita Rojas were that she was arrested at gunpoint, handcuffed, and spent ten days in jail, so I wanted to evoke those details in my design. Initially, I planned to convey prison by embroidering vertical lines over the Texas flag using chain stitch. But then I was concerned the lines might just look like stripes, and realized that actual lengths of a necklace chain would make the meaning more obvious and also evoke handcuffs. To me the design also conveys indirectly the ways that all Texas women of reproductive age are endangered by being “imprisoned” in the state. Some in Texas would like to make that imprisonment literal: in 2023, Cochran, Goliad, Lubbock, and Mitchell counties passed ordinances aimed at preventing women from leaving Texas to obtain abortions. Finally, in the process of researching the dimensions of the design of the Texas flag, I learned that the white stripe represents “purity.” To feminists, the ideal of purity is loaded, when applied to women. Typically, women are divided into good “pure” women, whose sexuality conforms to patriarchal norms, and “impure” women whose sexuality is bad and wrong. So much of anti-abortion discourse is designed to divide women into exactly these two groups: good, pure women who bear children according to patriarchal rules, and bad, impure women who violate sexual and reproductive rules by seeking abortions. All of this is a long way of saying, I purposely frayed the edge of the red stripe so the threads would trail over the white stripe. Because that’s how I feel about purity.