Un Due Weight uses the tradition of quilting as an intergenerational feminist political practice. I constructed a quilted cape that allows participants the opportunity to try on and feel the weight of both abortion legislation across the Americas, as well as the names of those imprisoned for seeking access to reproductive health.

I created three distinct types of quilt blocks/appliqué pieces for Un Due Weight. The first type are fabric blocks in a colour palette of the body: pinks, browns, beiges, and reds. These fabrics are remnants from items I’ve made for my daughters. I’ve embroidered these blocks with the names of women who are/have been imprisoned for seeking abortions. I laboured over these blocks, stitching every letter into the fabric, imagining each woman as I stitched her name. I left several blocks empty to represent the thousands of women whose names we do not know. I would like to have stitched more blocks, but my own labour shortage prevented me from doing this, as I had to parent my children.

The second type are appliquéd blocks made from my daughters’ stained baby wash cloths, stitched onto the collar of the cape in the symbol of parallel lines, a common symbol of pregnancy on home pregnancy tests. It is also an equal sign, as women are so often only considered people in relation to their status as mothers or as vessels for reproduction. The cloths make visible some of the labour of parenting. The third type of block is a traditional pieced quilt block that features four separate shapes coming together in a dynamic formation, representing the ways that women have organized improvised networks of support and resistance throughout the Americas. I’ve stitched these blocks onto the inner cape: a transparent, light-weight fabric that might be overlooked as a flimsy piece of lining, but that supports the structure of the outer cape and works around its weight. Each of these blocks tell different stories, but when brought together on the same garment these stories overlap and enlarge the narrative I am sharing. 

When constructing Un Due Weight, I chose to work with dominant ideas of femininity, creating a piece that modestly covers the body, displays rows of delicate ruffled fabric, and employs gendered colours like soft pink. I then transformed this marker of quaint, passive femininity by working against type, clearly transcribing anti-abortion legislation from across the Americas on the entirety of the cape and drawing viewers in by showing a peek of the underside of the cape, a site of remembering violence enacted on women in these very places.