Threading Postsocialist, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Intersections in Hybrid Spaces: Selected Women’s Textile Creations across the Czech and Slovak Borders

In this article, postcolonial and decolonial theories are used for an intersectional gender analysis of a selection of socialist and postsocialist textile artifacts made by women. The shared traits of the discussed handmade artifacts are threefold: they originate in the hybrid position of Czecho-Slovak socialist and postsocialist context, in the marginalized position of textiles in art disciplines including their association with femininity, and finally in their makers’ anonymity and/or authorship expropriation. The analysis uses Bhabha’s postcolonial concept of hybridity and Kalmar’s notion of the semi-periphery to point out inherent contradictions and ambivalences in the selected socialist and postsocialist women’s textiles. By drawing on Tlostanova, the article further demonstrates the relevance of decolonial thought for investigating creativity and art production in postsocialist societies that navigate the cooptation and extraction of creative labor by both the socialist economic system and the market economy following the post-Cold War economic transformation. The analyzed socialist tapestries within what is called Domácí umění tradition convey representations of the exoticized and racialized Other simultaneously with the socialist subjects’ desire for freedom of movement and travel. The postsocialist example of creativity—Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová’s crocheted tablecloth titled When Labor Becomes Form —communicates harsh criticism of patriarchal and ageist bias by unintentionally, but unavoidably, reiterating patriarchal and capitalist patterns of extraction of vulnerable labor and creativity. The article thus explores the difficulties in forging counterhegemonic resistance in the forms of creativity that entail femininity, textiles, and (post)socialist historical contexts.