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1	Life in the Penit: Framing and Performing Miami's Graffiti Subculture Merida, Victor M 28 March 2014 (has links) In the tradition of the Birmingham School of cultural studies, this thesis focuses on Miami’s graffiti subculture and the conflicts between market economies and economies of social meaning. As a reference point, I consider Miami’s “Penits”: the name given to the seemingly abandoned buildings where graffiti is performed. Short for penitentiary, the term derives from the 1980s after a large building rumored to be a prison was defunded midway through its construction. After this first reclamation, every other graffiti heterotopia in Miami has been similarly recoded as spaces that mock structures of discipline and industry. Through Michel Foucault’s biopolitical framework I argue that the sovereign state and marketplace conspire to dually criminalize and commoditize the subculture’s performative defiance. I conclude by illustrating how the market itself reinforces the carceral archipelago by framing the subculture’s vandal aesthetic through the normalized, self-interested boundaries of conduct that the market itself deems il/legal. Miami Miami Graffiti Penit Biopolitics Wynwood Reefa street art cultural studies Michel Foucault graffiti delinquency carceral archipelago heterotopia penitentiary American Popular Culture Other Arts and Humanities Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Regional Sociology Social Control, Law, Crime, and Deviance Sociology of Culture Theory and Criticism

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Life in the Penit: Framing and Performing Miami's Graffiti Subculture