{"id":1106,"date":"2016-01-14T09:00:25","date_gmt":"2016-01-14T09:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/?p=1106"},"modified":"2016-01-14T16:52:25","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T16:52:25","slug":"filler-writing-gender-on-the-walls-women-and-graffiti-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/2016\/01\/14\/filler-writing-gender-on-the-walls-women-and-graffiti-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Gender on the Walls–Women and Graffiti Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Inequality by (Interior) Design<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026it\u2019s a perfect example of how a seemingly inconsequential\u2014or half-destructive act\u2014like writing on the wall can actually promote social change… [simply by] making their gender visible on the wall.\u201d —Jessica Pab\u00f3n<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I love graffiti art.\u00a0 And I’m not talking about the sexist and racist tags you see in men’s bathroom stalls.\u00a0 I’m talking about the artwork decorating urban spaces that graffiti artists refer to as “pieces.”\u00a0 Graffiti is an interesting art form because the artists are–as Richard Lachmann<\/a> put it–“involved simultaneously in an art world and a deviant subculture” (here<\/a>: 230).<\/p>\n

When walking past a particularly involved piece, I often find myself wondering lots of things.\u00a0 “Who took the time to paint this?”\u00a0 “Was it free hand or did the artist have a plan before starting?”\u00a0 “What does it say?”\u00a0 Or when I can read the writing, “What does it mean?”\u00a0 “When did the artist do this?–In the middle of the night?”\u00a0 “How did they get away with it?”\u00a0 These are fleeting thoughts, but I’m always struck by the reclamation of public space.\u00a0 It’s such a powerful, public statement, claiming and labeling social space.\u00a0 As Jessica Pab\u00f3n puts it:<\/p>\n

Graffiti is a form of writing and writing is fundamentally a form of communicating.\u00a0 So these writers are reclaiming public space.\u00a0 They\u2019re asserting their presence.\u00a0 They\u2019re saying, \u201cI was here!… and here, and here, and here.\u201d (here<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Rather than considering it a deviant act aimed at defacing property, sociologists have found that graffiti artists are drawn by twin processes of appreciating its aesthetic appeal in addition to considering graffiti a practice through which they can make friends and form and solidify communities (here<\/a>).\"Screen<\/a>In Elijah Anderson<\/a>‘s Code of the Street<\/em><\/a>, he addresses the ways that boys and young men navigate public space and engage in performances of self that garner “respect”–a resource providing status and safety.\u00a0 While the book is primarily about boys and men, masculinity is not a dominant topic of analysis for Anderson.\u00a0 Yet, his analysis of “the street” treats it as a masculine space–a space in which masculine identities and reputations are formed, validated, “put on,” challenged, and “on the line.”\u00a0 Graffiti might be understood as part of Anderson’s code.\u00a0 Graffiti has a very “masculine” feel to it, and–like Anderson’s work–scholarship on graffiti often implicitly assumes that it’s boys and men writing, drawing, and painting on walls.\u00a0 Why men are doing this, and what graffiti means is the subject of the majority of research attention.\u00a0 Less attention is given to analyzing why (or possibly if) girls and women might engage in graffiti too.\u00a0 Jessica Pab\u00f3n (above) articulates some of the ways women have been able to accomplish this within the masculinized subcultural arena of graffiti art.<\/p>\n

\"image014\"<\/a>Pab\u00f3n’s research led her to realize that graffiti culture is increasingly digital.\u00a0 “Crews” no longer span only neighborhoods, but are increasingly globalized through the use of technology.\u00a0 Indeed, digital spaces provide women graffiti artists a community that might not have been able to exist previously.\u00a0 This transformation in graffiti culture has enabled the emergence of all-women graffiti crews.\u00a0 Some of the women Pab\u00f3n studied were also a part of graffiti crews composed primarily of men.\u00a0 Yet, technological changes in this subculture, relied upon by women artists feeling isolated, enabled the emergence of all-women crews.<\/p>\n

[G]raffiti culture [is] moving into a more publicly accessible (yet, still counterpublic) domain as it increasingly exists online; the remarkable increase[s in]… female writers’ access to and presence within the culture; [challenging] the discourse of place itself, now slightly removed from the hyperlocal, reconfigured away from “traditional” notions of authenticity rooted in identity and into those rooted in performance and participation. (Pab\u00f3n here<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"image028\"<\/a>All-women crews composed of women around the world challenge and support each other and their art form digitally through the creation of new spaces for visibility, communication, and support.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Pab\u00f3n found that most of the women graffiti artists she interviewed did not identify as feminists.\u00a0 Yet Pab\u00f3n was initially interested in the topic because she understood it as an incredibly feminist act.\u00a0 And, as she later discovered, it is.\u00a0 Because graffiti is (arguably) an already-gendered act–by which I mean cultural assumptions lead us to presume graffiti artists are men–women face a unique dilemma: gendering their artwork in ways that “out” them as women.<\/p>\n

No matter the words, you\u2019re thinking about this guy [the graffiti artist], not that girl.\u00a0 So if this<\/i> girl wants to be recognized, \u2018Hey I did that graffiti,\u2019 as a girl who did that, she has to mark it some way in her art. (Pab\u00f3n, here<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Screen<\/a>These small gendered “marks” are political; they work to allow women access to this “masculine” subculture and practice in ways that simultaneously (and often subtly) challenge the gender of graffiti art.\u00a0 Naming their crews the “Stick Up Girlz” and “PMS” is one way they publicly announce their gender.\u00a0 Some incorporate cultural symbols of femininity in small ways into their pieces, like ribbons, bows and hearts.\u00a0 Potentially unrecognizable to the casual observer, graffiti artists incorporate elaborate methods of “signing” their artwork, and these are some of the ways that women graffiti artists gender their signatures in ways that might be read as small acts of gender resistance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Inequality by (Interior) Design \u201c\u2026it\u2019s a perfect example of how a seemingly inconsequential\u2014or half-destructive act\u2014like writing on the wall can actually promote social change… [simply by] making their gender visible on the wall.\u201d —Jessica Pab\u00f3n I love graffiti art.\u00a0 And I’m not talking about the sexist and racist tags you see in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[245,30335,5007,26],"tags":[34965,915,34963,34966,34964],"class_list":["post-1106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminism","category-feminist-sociology","category-pop-culture","category-public-sociology","tag-gender-and-grafitti","tag-graffiti","tag-graffiti-art","tag-jessica-pabon","tag-tagging"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1106"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2580,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1106\/revisions\/2580"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}