Representations of Gender in Estonian Graffiti and Street Art

Abstract

The paper focuses on gender aspects in graffiti and street art as context- and communication-based cultural phenomena. The key issues tackled here are how gender aspects and gender-based communication are expressed in graffiti and the nature of the gendered aesthetics of street art. The analysis aims to identify gender clichés in graffiti, illustrating stereotypical views from a broader sociocultural perspective. The study also highlights the role of graffiti and street art in challenging gender stereotypes and bringing novel concepts to the fore. The paper combines studies on graffiti and street art with the gender studies approach and employs as a research method the contextualisation of graffiti and street art as ephemeral cultural phenomena from a viewer’s perspective. Graffiti works collected mainly in 2010–2020 and held in the online graffiti database of the Estonian Literary Museum constitute the sources of this paper.