Monday, October 5, 2015

Voices from the Line: The Clothesline Project as Healing Text

I am very familiar with The Clothesline Project. Last semester I was on the proposal and grant writing team for The Advocacy Center of Tompkins County and for our grant pitch, we presented The Clothesline Project. We had shirts hanging in the front of the room during our presentation, as well as digital versions of the shirts that I created on our Powerpoint. We used the shirts as a personal way of telling and showing the stories of those that would be helped via grant money. Though the shirts are very impactful from an audience stand-point, which is one of the motives of the project, Laura Julier discusses the healing aspect of the shirt's creation in chapter 14 of our textbook.

Through her exploration, Julier wishes to see how women voice themselves on the shirts, and how that reflects their healing process. She categorizes different themes she's observed in the shirts (i.e. telling what happened, speaking back, etc.), and discusses her interpretation of the rhetoric in regards to the healing.

As myself and Kirsten lead the discussion, I think it will be important to touch on public vs. private healing, the varying of time and space of the project, and the sense of community created within such a diverse range of survivors.

Specifically in regards to public vs. private healing, I would like to explore with the class how the public healing of speaking out (whether it be on an anonymous shirt, or something like SYM panels on our campus), can be more or less beneficial than private healing (journal writing, etc.). I am a sexual assault survivor and have only ever healed through writing publicly. I wrote a piece about my experiences that was published, and then gained the confidence to speak about my experiences in panels and on video in order to promote others' healing. I have done all my private healing through time passing, and want to not only explore the benefits of private healing in writing, but contrast that to public, and then discuss how The Clothesline Project manages both simultaneously.

Reflecting on Julier's piece on a basic content-level, I really enjoyed her inclusion of various texts, but wish there were more photos included as well. A lot of times, the text is given more or less meaning based on how and where it's written on the shirts, as well as the use of empty space. There is a reason the project is not exclusively printed word, and it is rather an artistic and visual project as well, and I wish the piece included more of that angle.