Georgina Spry, University of Chester

Tie-on pockets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were key to the woman’s experience of privacy, as one of the very few places that were secretive to the individual, allowing the woman out of the domestic interior, permitting the scholar not only to examine woman’s relationship with this interior but also the creation of female interiority.

Pockets have been shown to be an intimate place where scenarios can be projected and explored, enabling women to exercise and experience an individual uniqueness providing her with her personal life space which is central to privacy, serving as instruments to preserve secrecy.

The associations of the pockets to memory, imagination, secrecy and subversiveness have clearly shown the role played by pockets in the women’s experience of the interiority. Through an examination of current research, a clear integration between cultural and social practices is established, alongside a discursive relationship between the pocket and the social world, with the contents and the objects themselves acting as implements, helping us to understand the experience of a sense of self.

In an exploration of this fertile vessel, the pocket, in which we can allow ourselves as women to discover our own personal life-space, an investigation of my own intimate journey through a life-threatening illness has been undertaken, the private journey as opposed to the public portrayal.

These are marked through a series of textile pockets and autoethnographic ruminations which encompass key moments in the passage from diagnosis to recovery. Each textile pocket a story, holding a secret which is explored through the accompanying dialogue.

Therefore by studying the complex uses of pockets in a personal way we can consequently examine the relationships between self and other, exterior and interior, disclosure and secrecy. The liminal quality of the pockets allowing a catechistic enquiry tool in the investigation of notions of privacy. This enquiry permits the inquisition and the challenging of conventions between women and domestic interior, objects and subjects, privacy and secrecy.