Graffiti Grrlz by Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón

Author:Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

Figure 3.4. Jessica Pabón-Colón interviewing Queen Andrea, Welling Court Mural Project, Queens, NY, 2012. Photo credit ©Martha Cooper.

While I am empathetic to these concerns, I recognize them as issues for the subcultural participants to negotiate among themselves and hope they do so without reproducing the hetero/sexist bias that has long been directed at graff grrlz. For example, instead of disregarding graffiti posted in a digital space that is made by a grrl (and signified as such) because of a comment such as “I’m a writer in this city and I don’t know who she is,” writers might perhaps ask the question, “Well, why don’t we know who that is?” There are all sorts of reasons that might explain why a writer may not be known or respected by her local peers (recall RenOne’s experience). I challenge writers to think through the easy assumption that just because a writer is not well known (or, specifically, respected and appreciated) in their local community, that her work should not be considered if not appreciated (in and) beyond that locale based on stylistic innovation and proliferation. At first, I hesitated to claim that the Internet is providing a kind of subcultural revolution in agency and equality for graff grrlz. However, after years of delivering “bad news” about the isolation, sexual harassment, and devaluation of graff grrlz, when I started analyzing the effects of social media in particular I finally had good news to report. I want to value that transformation without glorifying it.

Thus, my concern is less with questions of authenticity and more with unintentionally bolstering the idea that “greater visibility of the hitherto under-represented leads to enhanced political power,” that digital representation is an uncomplicated solution to graff grrlz’ social subcultural precarity.47 The visibility and presence of graff grrlz—representation in and of itself—is not a magical solution to the misogyny in Hip Hop graffiti subculture, any more than the “fempowerment” campaigns brought to you by companies like Dove, Verizon, or Always are solutions to the ways that consumer culture exploits and abuses girls and women the world over. Expecting that once your identity is represented and made visible that you will be liberated from the oppressive effects of that same identity is risky (if not a failed project to begin with) if/when the identity being represented is rendered “essential,” if it is offered as stable and knowable; it is more productive to be strategic about your representation, the ways you are made visible.48 It is even better to control your own modes of representation. Graffiti grrlz do not expect that their digital ups will actually “do” anything for them—an expectation I hope to challenge and ask them to reconsider on a collective scale.

When I began this project, there were no digital platforms—or print for that matter—that connected graff grrlz worldwide. Today any dedicated graffiti lover can easily and quickly find graff grrlz through their various digital signatures. Feminism done/performed in the network is also feminism doing/performing a network, working the connections enabled. The

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