Showing papers on "Graffiti published in 1998"

THE IDEOLOGY OF "FAG": The School Experience of Gay Students

Abstract: used to devise ways of "seeing" social organization in the speech and graffiti in which the ideology of "fag" is realized in schools. His conception of the dialogic explicates the relationship between researcher and informants, as well as the dialogues internal to informants' narratives. Excerpts from their stories create windows into the local practices of the ideology of "fag" as they experienced it and made available the social organization of their everyday school lives. Analysis focuses on how speech, whether as verbal abuse or homophobic graffiti, concerts antigay activities, articulating to the wider organization of gender and the school as a regime. Informants' stories describe how "fag" as a stigmatized object is constituted in "gossip." Aspects of youths' appearance are interpreted with reference to "fag" as an underlying pattern. Everyday practices of "fag-baiting", such as poking fun, teasing, name calling, scrawling graffiti on lockers, insulting and harassing someone, produce the "fag" as a social object. The language intends a course of action isolating the gay student and inciting to physical violence. Verbal abuse both is and initiates attack. As a form of public speech, graffiti constitute a depersonalized form of threat and harassment. Whether a gay student is identified as "fag" or not, he acquires a gay identity/ consciousness through the practices of the ideology of "fag." What the article describes is a normal part of school organization. The social relations of heterosexuality and patriarchy dominate its public space. Being gay is never spoken of positively (in these informants' experience). Teachers are reported as being generally complicit by their silence if not actively participating in the ideology. Attacks on and ostracism of gay students are taken for granted. The heterosexism of the regime makes "fag" the stigmatized other and, reflexively, "fag" as stigmatized other feeds into the regime's heterosexism. Thus, the gay students' stories show the school's complicity in the everyday cruelties of the enforcement of heterosexist/homophobic hegemony. Gay and lesbian youth attend schools throughout the nation .... These students-from every ethnic and racial background, in urban, suburban, and rural schools-have sat

Freight train graffiti: Subculture, crime, dislocation

Abstract: In the widespread and growing hip hop graffiti underground, a new subcultural practice has recently become popular: the illegal painting of graffiti on outbound freight trains as a means of sending graffiti images out from their initial, circumscribed points of production into wider circulation. Using ethnographic methods appropriate to such a fluid, dislocated, and visually rich subject of study, I examine the proliferation of freight train graffiti, and the cultural and historical dynamics surrounding it. I also document the ways in which freight train graffiti both reproduces and expands long-standing orientations in the hip hop graffiti underground toward spatial mobility and symbolic expansion. Finally, I explore a variety of cultural and theoretical trajectories that freight train graffiti suggests: the development of criminal and deviant subcultures as dislocated symbolic communities; the interweaving of crime, cultural space, media, and audience; and the emergence of postmodern or anarchistic form...

Assessment and mitigation measures for graffiti on highway structures

Abstract: Highway structures are public works facilities that are inherently accessible, to a certain degree, to the general public at all hours of the day and every day of the year. As a result, some highway structures are susceptible to graffiti. Graffiti on highway structures is a significant problem throughout the United States. Not only is graffiti an eyesore to the traveling public, it presents a hazard to the perpetrator and a liability exposure for transportation agencies because highway structures span high elevations and are in close proximity to motor vehicle traffic. The most common methods for combating graffiti include washing the surface of the structure with high-pressure water sprays, repainting the surface, and sandblasting. Although each of these methods can, in most cases, effectively remove the graffiti, the solution is often temporary; more graffiti is likely to appear in the future at the same site. Further, these measures can be quite costly, especially if they have to be repeated on numerou...

Grafitos de banheiro: um estudo de diferenças de gênero

Abstract: Restroom graffiti: A study of gender differences. Gender differences in restroom graffiti (N = 1349) were analyzed, focusing on aspects of the human sexuality. Graffiti were

Tourist graffiti from the Ramesside period

Abstract: Tout comme aujourd'hui, les sites egyptiens etaient souvent visites dans l'Antiquite, comme en temoignent les graffiti ou les inscriptions laissees par les scribes et les Egyptiens lettres. Sous la XIXe dynastie, l'enthousiasme pour les monuments de l'Ancien Empire, en particulier Saqqara, est demontre par l'activite du prince Khaemouas. Sa visite archeologique des cimetieres de Memphis est la plus celebre visite de touriste du Nouvel Empire. L'auteur rescence et publie quelques-uns des graffiti laisses par les visiteurs des monuments de l'Ancien Empire, sous le Nouvel Empire

Graffiti and Sacred Spaces: Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Dorchester, N.B.

Abstract: THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF graffiti has in recent years captured the attention of anthropologists, folklorists, social psychologists, ethnographers and sociolinguistic researchers.2 However banal, generic or ephemeral, two prominent scholars observe, “the very pervasiveness of graffiti over time and space...entitles them to serious study as much as any other record” of human civilization. Such assumptions rest squarely on the premise that “every graffito can thus be seen and/or read as a miniature autobiography of a member of a society in the sense that the graffitist reveals a part of himself and his society in all that he writes”.3 The historiography, which ranges from antiquarian to innovative, attempts to unveil the meanings of the style, content and communicative function of this idiom. Latrinalia, for instance, have generated so much academic scrutiny that they constitute a distinct subclass of graffiti research.4 Despite attempts to formalize a methodology for data collection and content analysis, however, the study of graffiti is fraught with problematic theorizing. Much of the literature focuses on formulating certain “motivational hypotheses” about the individuals and societal attitudes which produce wall inscriptions and drawings.5 Graffiti have been identified variously as a vernacular expression of anti-authoritarianism, repressed sexuality, adolescent aggression and artistic individualism.6 In recent years, the graffiti that adorn subways,