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Proposal for the 7^th International Conference of the Gender and Education Association

Presenter: joshua j. kurz (Doctoral Student), Ohio State University

Paper Title:  (Re)writing the Wall: Artistic Practices as Alternative Public Participation

We are at a critical juncture in American democracy and, in order to re-engage with the world through more complex and nuanced means, educators must refocus civic education in ways that allow young people to articulate a multiplicity of citizenship identifications.  Exploring specific practices of youth civic identification can begin to radicalize notions of American democracy and erode a destructive, neoliberal American ego.

Chantal Mouffe writes extensively on the nature of democratic politics and processes of public participation.  In Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Intervention in Public Space, she writes “Once we accept that identities are never pre-given but that they are always the result of processes of identification…the question that arises is the type of identity that critical artistic practices should aim at fostering.”  Identification within a democratic context is a complex practice that includes how one defines citizenship and public participation.

Contemporary discussions in American schools of citizenship education focus on the processes of civic engagement.  This focus is now regulated to the point at which it has gained popular traction, to the extent that many high schools and colleges now require specific civic engagement – read “volunteerism” – criteria for graduation.  However, the vast literature that exists is often blind to alternative notions of public participation, focusing instead on traditional, typically masculine, procedural notions of civic responsibility such as voting, philanthropy, and volunteerism.  These “civic engagement” practices help form citizens as subjects, and, as such, require critical attention.

Standing in the face of these conservative, neoliberal traditions of civic engagement are many youth engaging in practices that are considered artistic, but not civically engaging or political.  These practices include, but are not limited to, graffiti, spoken word poetry, and many others.  This paper will theorize these practices as alternative citizenship identifications.

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Artistic In(ter)ventions: Pain, Pleasure, and Graffiti as an Agonistic Politics of the Performative

            Graffiti as an art form has experienced the double move which Foucault referenced in History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction; it is censored, yet experiences a profusion of utterances transnationally. I will explore graffiti as an expression of urban youth in a liminal state, experiencing the pain of subjectivication in urban life and the pleasures of subversive political expression.

            This paper will consider the practice of graffiti as a politics of the performative (Butler) in light of the conditions of agonistic democracy (Mouffe). Butler discusses individual and collective responsibility, summarized in Precarious Life:

Those who commit acts of violence are surely responsible for them; but they are not dupes or mechanisms of an impersonal social force, but agents with responsibility. On the other hand, these individuals are formed, and we would be making a mistake if we reduced their actions to purely self-generative acts of will of symptoms of individual pathology or “evil.” (p. 15)

This should be contextualized by Mouffe’s theory of agonistic democracy, summarized in The Return of the Political:

When we accept that every identity is relational and that the condition of existence of every identity is the affirmation of a difference, the determination of an ‘other’ that is going to play the role of a ‘constitutive outside’, it is possible to understand how antagonisms arise. (p. 2)

This paper will offer a textual reading of the practice of graffiti in an attempt to explode the limits of what is traditionally thought of as political participation.