PART THREE - Challenging gender norms in city-based recreational practices

hoop dance and queer performance 

By Cheshia Toka (Insta @electricchesh)

Part three - Street art and performativity

Street art is a predominantly masculine scene. It is a visual addition for filming hoop practice outdoors because it provides an interesting and colourful backdrop to use when creating videos to share online, and utilising this scene places me outside of the structures of femininity and enables me to queer the space. Street hooping has yet to enter mainstream popular culture; hoopers find it useful to connect to wider communities online as outdoor practitioners in the local area are few and far between. In my quest to find an interesting backdrop to fill my videos where I dance and execute tricks, I venture into Brighton and place myself within the scene of male street artists, often called “writers”. Street corners, electricity boxes, and shutters are frequently tagged with spray cans and pens as territorial references to indicate the owner of the tag was present in that location. Following Butler’s performativity, male street art can be understood as an enactment of historically masculine behaviour in public space, for example like that of the flâneur: larger graffiti pieces take up bigger sections of outdoor walls and are executed by local artists who take their time designing calligraphy, or “hand styles”. These pieces create a feeling the territory has been claimed by the artist. The hand styles of the pieces are designed to look sharp, bold, and intimidating for personal flare, thus creating a mood when one steps into the space. Some graffiti pieces in the city have been scrawled over with obscene language by other writers who dislike others’ styles or the artists themselves; a hostile environment where pieces of art are in conflict with one another. This behaviour constitutes an act that, “has been going on before one arrived on the scene” (Butler, 1988:526). The historical picture of men as confidently occupying public space is occurs here through this performativity.  

Immediately, I become part of the negotiation of masculine territory for art space. Choosing a graffiti piece to suit my taste based on colours and composition, I occupy the space in front of it physically by spreading my body to spin the hoop while I film, usually for about an hour at a time. The combination of my movement and the music I use fills the space creating a high-energy atmosphere where I aim to increase my visibility. This process comprises a literal performance and a gendered performance. In my video, I temporarily occupy the space between the camera and the wall to enact my performance art: spinning my hoop in motion against the static background, I impose my 3D self onto the male writers’ art and this is captured and processed into the 2D image on my phone screen. I claim my own space by becoming an ephemeral moving tag, inscribing my hoop on top of the graffiti. The motions that my hooping take up are mostly just associated with the music: hip-hop brings with it connotations of breakdance, and drum and bass associated with the paces of skanking, from ska music, where both of these practices of dance have stances that are typically low to the ground. I usually resume a stance that is low to the ground to execute tricks: should they fail, I am closer to the floor to pick up the hoop. I act in ways that the music encourages me to dance. Further, I switch between masculine and feminine traits, for example, some days I swamp my body in the fabrics of oversized t-shirts and hoodies, the typically masculine choice of clothing that hides my female bodily features. Other days I wear crop-tops and leggings as one might expect a young woman to dress in for fitness. This is the essence of performativity in my hoop dance. I intercept the status quo in graffiti art as a male activity of claiming territory by adding myself to the equation, as a non-binary female.  

Here, I bring in an example of female performativity in street art to create the comparison between the enactment of my queer self and the enactment of womanhood. Farinosi and Fortunati (2018) explore yarn-bombing as a worldwide movement that is comparable to street graffiti, except in the form of knitted fabrics rather than spray paint imposed on the urban environment. In this study, they examine yarn-bombing as a form of feminist craftism and citizen engagement in Italy: the knitted fabrics were created by groups of women in the city and installed into public space. Designed for a cause, the yarn bombing was, “community oriented and intended to draw public attention to relevant social and political problems, such as war” (2018:139). Their article describes knitting as an “old-fashioned technique” (2018:139) that adjusts its value to become an activist practice by being present in the city with the intention of change. These women used a “historically constituted” (Butler, 1988:530) enactment of femininity – knitting – perhaps usually done in private spaces such as the home and brought this to a public space to establish female agency and attention to politics in the outdoors. In comparison, I intend not to bring with me any “old-fashioned technique” that is associated with the enactment of femininity and subvert the normative behaviours enacted in public space by occupying it without these historically constituted acts. 

Hooping has historically been taken up by men and women across the globe, and although it can enable feminine and masculine performance, it can also be a mode of queer expression that exists between the two. For example, in Jan Camp’s book she tracks the story of a polyamorous Mexican hooper, Karis, who uses hoop dance to express both their male and female ‘sides’ through burlesque-style hoop shows (2013:158). From my observations of the widespread influences of hooping captured across the globe, the uniqueness of this practice stems from it being free from being reserved for any certain racial, ethnic, class, or gendered confines, as an activity that is open to interpretation by the individual and moulds to the shape of the culture in which it is conceived. Like the yarn-bombers, I take up space on the street by imposing my art, but I do this without totally abiding by the enactment of femininity as I seek to distance myself from the notion of being a woman. Butler puts forward that, “women cannot be said to exist” (2018:529), and since I am not enacting behaviour understood to be that fundamentally associated with characteristics of womanhood, I engage in a performative process that comprises part of my non-binary identity, as I separate from the category of “woman”. Similarly to Butler, my objective, “is not to re-describe the world from the point of view of women” (1988:529) as I cannot speak for all women, even if I am read as a woman. If I am read as female, my actions still serve to discursively undo the gendered expectations of being a woman in public space: I reject various notions of womanhood to form my non-binary identity by crossing into typically masculine behaviours in masculine territories, such as through dressing and being confident on my own in the public spaces of the graffiti scene. In this section, I have shown how I enable myself to associate with predominantly masculine graffiti art to “mismatch” (Jagose,1996:3) my biological sex with expected female performativity. 

~COME BACK NEXT WEEK FOR PART FOUR~