The quilt becomes the intertextual mapping of that which has been traditionally erased or hidden. In developing the digital story quilt technology, I have used texts - of quilting poems, interviews with quilters, and quilting stories - to tease out quilting tactics that might suggest an approach to resistive tactics.

The distinctive features of the quilt are due to the economy enforced on it by the constraints on its creators:

• fragmentation
• condensation, and
• juxtaposition.

1: Fragmentation-Of the Fabric of Time and Space

The process of quilting is one that has been characterized as femmage, the feminine equivalent of bricolage, says Turner (Elsley 1996, 13). The quilter collects and creatively assembles the odd or seemingly disparate elements into a functional, integrated whole. Femmage is distinguished from bricolage in its aesthetic function of connection and relationships (Elsley 1996, 13). The process of making fragments creates a necessary space, suggests Elsley, one that is disruptive and destabilizing, from which a woman can begin her task of self-creation. "Tearing fabric apart has the effect of creating space between the pieces," says Elsley. This place of liminality, this undefined space, becomes a place of creative freedom (Elsley 1996, 10).

This fragmented method of work allows us to take the patterns women create and the meanings women invent and learn from them.

2: Condensation - Formulaic Patterns of Narrative

The fabric patch, unsecured from its original use, becomes a synecdoche by which a part stands in place of the whole. The synecdoche makes the visual more dense and miniaturizes the story of the cloth from which the patch originated. In other words, the patch becomes the story, the decorative container, a relay to everyday narratives.

Condensation, or miniaturization, occurs at the level of the individual or family unit. These inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, says de Certeau, are like stories held in reserve (108). These family stories or life stories remain in an enigmatic state, until they are joined into the metanarrative of the quilt, to become symbolizations of habitable, intimate spaces.

As Donna Haraway describes, "Out of each of these nodes or stem cells, sticky threads lead to every nook and cranny of the world." (129). Haraway describes how each stem cell or patch becomes

...a knot of knowledge-making practices, industry, and commerce, popular culture, social struggles, psychoanalytic formations, bodily histories, human and nonhuman actions, local and global flows, inherited narratives, new stories, syncretic technical/cultural processes, and more. (129)

These stem cells of situated knowledge are analogous to de Certeau's symbolizing kernels. When juxtaposed with other patches, de Certeau says, the resulting discourse creates "a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning" where they form a symbolic whole (102).

3: Juxtaposition - The Intertextual, Polyvocality of Piecing

The quilt, as Patti Lather describes, is a move "toward a mosaic, multilayered text designed to interrupt the reductiveness of the restricted economies of representation" (234). The creation of the quilt unravels connecting threads, juxtaposing narratives, forcing the viewer to shift attention from gazing at the quilt pattern to finding meaning for themselves within the quilt text. If we map what we learn, connecting one meaning to another, we begin to lay out a different way of seeing reality (Aptheker 39).

Quilting creates room for social differences, for local and situated knowledge and for the agency that resituates these as a challenge to objectified notions of knowledge. In its simplicity, the quilt epistemology allows for individual voices to interact in a communal space, defining what Mikhail Bakhtin once called "an eternal harmony of unmerged voices" (Tanaka 264).