This article examines how Internet memes about graffiti are used to negotiate cultural meanings of aging within a youth-coded subculture. Memes are approached as affordances for performances of selfhood and negotiations of subcultural identities and group boundaries. The article investigates how memes represent and address tensions between ideals of subversive subcultural life and lived experience. While graffiti is associated with youth and risk-taking, many graffiti writers are now adults with families and work-related obligations. Memes about graffiti construct ironic narratives in which aging writers are placed in environments, situations, and roles that appear anomalous relative to graffiti’s cultural meanings. Women and aging bodies are represented as blocking characters that conflict with claims to authenticity, threaten subcultural boundaries, and disrupt collective solidarity among graffiti writers. These representations negotiate how aging challenges symbolic binaries between what is constructed as sacred and profane. The study demonstrates the analytical and methodological value of studying memes as sites of subcultural meaning-making. It suggests that memes may offer a means for individuals to reconcile with the dilemma of aging in a youth-coded subculture.
Malcolm Jacobson (Thu,) studied this question.