Recently I undertook a literature review for my Masters of Research.

This allowed me to delve into my research field and look at the literature surrounding my topic. I found there was limited research particularly when looking at female street artists. There was information on individual artists, however, a discussion on the gender imbalance within the sub-culture seemed to be missing.

Common research surrounding street can be grouped into four key areas: the historical context and beginnings of the sub-culture  (Gomez: 1993); more recent research around the legalities (Young: 2013); art in a public space (McAuliffe: 2012); and, the engagement of street art within the community and how it is used as a tool for discussion (Hansen & Danny: 2015).

In a recent article run by the ABC, Meet the women of Australia’s street art scene, the gender imbalance was discussed. This imbalance can be traced back to the origins of graffiti, and specifically tagging. This was about artists marking their territories and making a name for themselves on the street that was visually repeated – in other words, creating ‘street cred’.

If this was all there is to it, graffiti is simply about creating a name and justifying your existence on the street! That means, that gender plays no role in this!

But as a male dominated industry is there a need to look at the gender roles that exist?

Female street artist Kaff-eine, feels that she is an artist and her existence in street art does not need to be justified by her biological sex. However many female artists feel that they don’t want to compete with  male artists, they just want to be seen on equal terms.

The challenge seems to be that they feel compelled to continually prove themselves as being equal! As stated by street artist Vexta:

“A lot of time you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to get noticed …”

I found this interesting for I was looking at street art whilst I was in Adelaide a couple of weekends ago and I found myself analysing street art and trying to work out if an artwork was painted by a male or female. Everywhere I looked in Adelaide there was beautiful works through the city and it made me start thinking about how to approach this topic.

These ideas will hopefully be expanded in my research.

References

Gomez, Marisa A (1993) The Writing on Our Walls: Finding Solutions through Distinguishing Graffiti Art from Graffiti Vandalism. University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 26.3: 633-707.

Susan Hansen & Flynn Danny (2015) This is not a Banksy!: street art as aesthetic protest, Continuum, 29:6, 898-912.

Mcauliffe, Cameron (2012) Graffiti or Street Art? Negotiating the moral geographies of the creative city. Journal of Urban Affairs 34.2: 189-206.

Young, Alison (2013) Street Art, Public City : Law, Crime and the Urban Imagination. Taylor and Francis, Florence, Italy.