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This quilt documents sexual violence migrant women experience and demonstrates Quilting as Method, a feminist, qualitative research method. The author argues that tactile approaches to research can deepen understandings of shallowly understood experiences.
T his quilt documents the state-sanctioned sexual violences1 experienced by women migrating through Mexico to the United States. The panels of the quilt are mostly based on Óscar Martínez's book The Beast, which chronicles the intricacies of the journey migrants make from Central America to the United States. This quilt documents five particular instances when migrant women experience violence during their journey and once they arrive in the US. The quilt argues that such violences are state-sanctioned because both the US and Mexican governments know about the violences women experience, yet the governments take no action, and sexual violences continue to be an integral part of migrants' journey north.
I present the quilt here as an example of the product of what I call Quilting as Method (QAM), a feminist, qualitative research method. The quilt is the published research piece. This written portion briefly explains the context of considering a quilt as research but does not make a complete argument for that2. I suggest the reader focus on the quilt as a valued product of quilting as method, as I do believe that QAM is a method from which the field of rhetoric and composition could benefit. Therefore, this written part should be considered a supplemental text-akin to an artist statement or footnote-for the actual research product, which is the quilt.
Quilting as Method in Rhetoric and Composition
In order to understand how QAM could be useful for rhetoric and composition scholars, one must first consider some important contexts of our field, historically and currently. As indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues in her book Decolonizing Methodologies, "what counts as Western research draws from an 'archive' of knowledge and systems, rules and values which stretch beyond the boundaries of Western science to the system now referred to as the West" (42). There is no doubt that the field of rhetoric and composition operates according to a history, within institutions, and according to values of the "West." Although the history of our field has followed the Western trajectory fr°m ancient Gr to...
