Constructive Destruction: Graffiti as a Tool for Making Masculinity

Abstract

This chapter will move beyond the rewards of fame, respect and status to explore other, perhaps less immediate, reasons for writers’ involvements. What else do they gain from participating in this subculture? A member of the CCCS group would probably say a chance to resist hegemony and solve, ‘albeit magically’ (Cohen, 1972: 23, as quoted by Clarke et al., 1976: 32), class-related problems or contradictions. But does this theory still hold good? Recent theorists have said not (Griffin, 1993; McRobbie, 1994). During the mid 1980s, postmodern critics stepped in and sent Marxism, in its various guises, into a state of crisis, attacking ‘its teleological propositions, meta-narrative status, essentialism, economism, Eurocentrism and its place within the whole Enlightenment project’ (McRobbie, 1994: 44). In dismantling their vision of a unified and fixed society, Marxist notions of resistance started to crumble (Griffin, 1993) and moves beyond this theoretical vocabulary started to be made (McRobbie, 1994).