MAP-ping Queerness? Street Art in Philadelphia

This article reflects on how street art helps to “queer” the city of Philadelphia. America’s sixth largest city has come to be known as the “City of Murals” following the initiative started by Mural Arts Philadelphia’s (MAP) Executive Director Jane Golden in 1987. It has also in recent years been re-branded as a queer city. Firstly, I consider how street art represents queer communities, drawing on human geographer Felix Driver’s paradigm of image-centred or “imaginative geography.” Based on a non-representational model of geography, I also reflect on how street art allows the queer community to constitute spaces for LGBTQIA+ people of colour. Philadelphia’s street art enables individual self-determination, as well as congregation, contestation, and conversation among queer people of colour, and between the queer and wider communities, in Philadelphia today. Following recent work on digital geographies of sexuality, a number of examples considered in this article focus on the power of digital media to re-purpose MAP’s murals and Philadelphia’s street art for queer purposes.