Politics of the Thread: A Feminist Reading of Corte e costura, by Marina Gaspar

Abstract

Corte e costura, by Marina Gaspar, is structured through the logic of the fragment. Each poem operates as a “cut” — a gesture that interrupts linearity and reveals an isolated, autonomous memory, almost like scattered scraps. At the same time, these fragments establish a “sewing”: an effort to mend experiences, stitch together memories, and produce meaning from what endures. The book thus constructs a poetics of discontinuity, in which remembering and narrating entail negotiating what can or cannot enter the fabric of expression. Throughout the work, sewing and writing become parallel gestures: both involve tearing, mending, reconstructing, and inscribing new possibilities of existence. The instability of the poems — their fragmentation, ruptures, and silences — reflects the instability of the analytical categories within contemporary feminism itself. In this sense, the work suggests that, like fabric, memory and knowledge are also composed of gaps, repairs, and overlaps. What interests me in this study, therefore, is the poetic construction of Marina Gaspar’s work: how cutting, threads, and knots — gestures of sewing — emerge as discursive procedures for the reworking of memory and the construction of the archive; how these procedures may be read within a broader context, considering the relationships they establish across different temporalities; and finally, to what extent the approximation between sewing and text can be understood as productive for the construction of a feminist epistemology.