i lift you up by Ginger Brooks Takahashi
Medium: embroidery on paper
Size: 7.75″ x 5.75″
Artist Statement: Our nature is our virtue (2006-2007) Excerpted from Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body, these embroidered texts externalize radical sexual fantasies in the form of embroidered samplers. This series consists of ten framed texts.
Les Guérillères, published in 1969, five years after Wittig’s first novel, revolves around the elles, women warriors who have created their own sovereign state by overthrowing the patriarchal world. The novel is structured through a series of prose poems. “Elles are not ‘the women’–a mistranslation that often surfaces in David Le Vay’s English rendition–but rather the universal ‘they,’ a linguistic assault on the masculine collective pronoun ils.”[12] The novel initially describes the world that the elles have created and ends with members recounting the days of war that led to the sovereign state.
