Kunst-Forschung-Geschlecht: Guisela Latorre

Feminist Disruptions and Enhanced Subjectvities - Graffiteras? Transformation of the Chilean City

The post-dictatorship era in Chile (1990-present) saw an explosion of urban art expressions. Women graffiti artists or graffiteras have actively participated in these public interventions by painting, ?tagging? and ?bombing? urban landscapes thus challenging the male domination of these spaces. Their participation has been facilitated by the loosening of restrictions over freedom of expression brought about by the advent of democratic rule but also by the feelings of discontent toward the unfulfilled promises of the post-dictatorship. The artists we will discuss utilize graffiti as an alternative and non-patriarchal means of public communication. Latorre thus contend that we can situate their activities within the broader history of public art in Chile and Latin America while understanding their interventions as new feminist incursions into Chilean public life. Moreover, Latorre will argue that the work of Chilean graffiteras operates within a continuum that straddles their own subjectivity as individual artists and the collectivity embodied by the communities surrounding them. This process of engaging the collective and transcending individual aesthetics can, in turn, enhance subjectivity itself. It is this site of enhanced subjectivity that these graffiteras mine as they set out to carve feminist spaces in city streets.

Guisela Latorre is currently associate professor and interim chair of the Department of Women?s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University (United States) as well as co-editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. She is now working on a book on the Chilean mural and graffiti movement which will follow her first book, Walls of Empowerment: Chicana/o Indigenist Murals of California (2008).