ABSTRACT
My sense that graffiting is a gendered cultural practice first arose during discussions with high-school students. I interviewed a group of boys separately from a group of girls during school hours about what graffiti meant to them and whether they participated in its production. The school was chosen because its constituency included a high proportion of working-class and Aboriginal children; the assumption underlying the choice of topic was that graffiti holds a special meaning for working-class kids as an art form of the dispossessed. It gives expression to their lives in a way that ‘legitimate’ communication codes do not.
