I feel like I kind of knew what to expect going into this section because of where I lived the majority of my life and the people I grew up around. Some of my friends in high school were graffiti artists and wanna be rappers (mostly cis females, but some cis males). There’s this look that some people give when they find out a woman is the one throwing art up on the wall of a building or wanting to spit bars. I’m not really sure that anything challenged my preconceptions and only because I bore witness to the way different friends were treated based on their gender. It seems female artists that present more masculine tend to be taken more seriously and aren’t nearly as sexualized as more feminine presenting female artists. Obviously.

The thing that stuck out the most to me was when we talked about a graffiti artist in class named (I’m drawing a complete blank on the name and lost the link to the interview) so I looked up the interview. Everyone in class seemed to assume the artist was a male (I’m guilty of it), turns out she isn’t and she doesn’t identify as a feminist either. Even though she’s in a space that would almost prefer to work against her at most times. I’m really into graffiti art so I’d really love to learn more about anything that has to do with it. Your book Graffiti Girlz has given me plenty of knowledge so far and I look forward to getting more into it. It’s already helped my own mind shift to not assuming an artist is a male right off the bat because of how ‘women involved’ it is. I actually spent a whole night looking into women graffiti artists after that and fell in love with Swoon because she goes far beyond street art. I’ve spent a majority of the time almost obsessing over women in graffiti art just because of the one artist we talked about in class. I hope it’s okay that I went off about women in graffiti art and almost completely ignored everything else aka the hip hop music part.