Victoria Sin, performance at “Glitch @ Night” organized by Legacy Russell as part of “Post – Cyber Feminist International,” 2017, ICA London, courtesy of ICA London, photograph by Mark Blower. We’ve known for quite some time that the internet is not a utopia. It began as ARPANET. It had its roots in the military. It has always been used for corporate ends. It has never provided us complete freedom from the kind of challenges that afflict us away from our screens. There are very few people who are making this kind of work who aren’t asking these kinds of questions. I’m thinking about American Artist, who’s in the book, and the incredible work that they’ve done about predictive policing. Glitch Feminism is a monumental publication in its (re)framing of glitch as feminist and as the power of “no.” It’s a timely release with well-chosen artists spotlighted (Russell is a curator after all!), with Russell’s art criticism angle bringing a fresh focus to thinking about the space of potential between intersectionality, data capitalism, and digital technology. Many of the themes Russell brings up greatly overlap with trans literature, such as the dilemma of visibility, (il)legibility, ethics of the archive and (mis)labelling, and the body; there is room here to further bring trans perspectives into Glitch Feminism. These essays hold great relevance to women and gender studies, queer and trans studies, anti-racism, critical encounters with archives, digital humanities, contemporary art, new media and visual/screen cultures, community-engaged arts, and so forth. If you’re interested in any of these areas or looking to read an intersectional take on embodiment, what it means to have a body in a digital age, and what it means to be connected, Glitch Feminism is highly recommended. Embodiment is time and time again positioned as parallel to glitch — both are ongoing, both hold potential for expansion and reconceptualization in tandem with each other: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a body. And one is not born, but rather becomes, a glitch”. [8] This is where I think it’s useful to talk about the personal again. In the early days of grad school, when I was getting my MRes at Goldsmiths or even during my undergraduate study, I’d present papers and research and end up on stage with folks who were absolutely brilliant but really narrow in terms of their understanding of Cyberfeminist history.

I came across Mark Aguhar’s work in my own late-night surfing of the net, and it’s been a great joy to see it emerge into different places and spaces: some of the work was included in “ Trap Door” at the New Museum and then again in the Brooklyn Museum’s “ Nobody Promised You Tomorrow.” Mark has an enduring presence across conversations about the digital and queering the body in many different spheres.

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Anna Weiner, ‘The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s ‘Whole Earth Catalogue’ New Yorker , November 16, 2018. As discussed in the chapter “Glitch is Cosmic,” we as embodied beings are multitudinous and constantly becoming, never static and singular in our identities. A person’s virtual avatar is as real in cyberspace, or the “digital real,” as their offline self. [5] We can travel beyond what we typically think of as a body (that becomes gendered) to consider our virtual selves. To break through the confines of what counts as a body is to destabilize the dualistic delineations of normativity imposed upon bodies, including binary gender categories. If the body is “inconceivably vast” like the cosmos, then to queer is to expand potential for being, because, recalling Russell’s reference to Muñoz, there are gaps that must be filled, a queer ethos of yearning for more. [6] To glitch is to disrupt systems, sledgehammering holes into taken-for-granted logics of oppression — a queering in itself. Glitch is queer, queer is cosmic. Victoria Sin, Performance at “Glitch @ Night” organized by Legacy Russell as part of Post – Cyber Feminist International, 2017, ICA London, courtesy of ICA London, photograph by Mark Blower. Aspects of the world have been changing so fast that it was hard at points to think about what needed to be pinned down and what needed to be allowed to change as the world changed. To me, the constants were the artists and the artwork that I discuss. They allow for certain types of constant engagement, that can be set against these broader world events. Travis Alabanza quoted in Lola Olufemi, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power(Pluto Press, 2020) p. 49. Russell worked at the online platform Artsy, expanding the company's gallery relations across Europe. [10] She has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and CREATIVE TIME. [ citation needed] She is a contributing editor at BOMB Magazine. [10] Writing edit

How can glitch, which at its core is refusal, be reworked as something wonderful in our feminist, queer, and anti-racist utopic envisioning and collective mobilizations? As a conceptual framework, glitch reconfigures the typically pejorative way we view failure, brokenness, and the refusal to function. Instead, as Russell convincingly invites us to do, glitch should be welcomed — “the error a passageway” to constructing better worlds. [2] This is because, and here Russell situates glitch feminism in queer-of-colour theory by quoting José Esteban Muñoz: “…this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” [3] Russell draws on Shaadi Devereaux’s analysis of social media as a tool for marginalized women to reach each other, build collective support, and engage in conversation where they might usually be excluded in AFK domains. [4] To break, to dismantle, to fail fantastically in the face of a machine that expects us to keep carrying on as if it isn’t stifling and isn’t programmed to reward some and marginalize others. It is to carve fissures in existing, oppressive systems and its limitations on who we might be and what realms we might inhabit. Next: 28 Art Curators to Watch Who Took on New Appointments in 2018". 30 December 2018 . Retrieved 2020-06-17.Damiani, Jesse. "On Embodying The Ecstatic And Catastrophic Error Of Glitch Feminism: Book Review". Forbes . Retrieved 2021-01-11. I wondered if that was part of the symbolic work that “glitch” was doing, taking the argument beyond Cyberfeminism. In one of its strands, Cyberfeminism was very utopian, claiming technology as a vehicle of liberation. The glitch seems to be about inhabiting contradiction: you’re in those spaces, but also looking for the moments where you can turn them against themselves, where they break down. Russell thoughtfully frames every chapter around case studies of artists, writers, and fellow cyborgs who practice refusal and embody glitch — a perfect brew of glitch feminist theory and praxis. The extensive epigraphs at the very start of the book plus the ones that open each chapter take the form of both quotes and images, introducing us to those who’ve engaged with the themes at hand before Russell: Etheridge Knight, Mark Aguhar, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Ocean Vuong, E. Jane, T. Fleischmann, and so on. These spotlights and epigraphs certainly shine in Glitch Feminism, acting as Russell’s odes to fellow feminist, queer, trans, and racialized disruptors who’ve impacted their work. Lil Miquela, courtesy of Brud. Glitch Feminism continues the legacies of cyberfeminism and cyborg feminism by evoking questions of how the complexities of embodiment, so entwined with experiences of gender, queerness, and racialization, extend into digital realms. How can glitch, which at its core is refusal, be reworked as something wonderful in our feminist, queer, and anti-racist utopic envisioning and collective mobilizations? What does it mean to embody glitch, to embody malfunction? I want to think about the fact that the people themselves—myself included—are the glitch in the system, to ask the question of what it means to be a broken self, to fail in a system that has failed us, rather than to succumb to the pressure to assimilate or conform within a culture that doesn’t love us, a culture that does not recognize our right to live and make a life.

a b "Legacy Russell on Glitch Feminism, Curating and the Upside of Growing Up in New York". Cultured Magazine. 2019-01-25 . Retrieved 2020-06-17. I can’t talk about Glitch Feminism without talking about Mark Aguhar, who passed away in 2012 and was gender queer and both an incredible performance artist and a producer of many different types of texts. I think it’s complicated. I appreciate you asking this question, because I think it’s important to try to navigate. For work on the violence trans people face see, for example, Hilary Aked, ‘ Neulisa Luciano Ruiz’s death reminds us of the risks trans people face just for using the bathroom’ The Independent , 29 February, 2020 , Stonewall, LGBT in Britain: Trans Report.You connect it to the earlier moment of ’90s Cyberfeminism. How do you consider what you’re doing as developing or correcting that tradition?

Russell writes about art, gender, race, and technology, particularly as they intersect with histories of cyberculture. In 2012, Russell coined the term "Glitch Feminism", [11] which Russell says "embod[ies] error as a disruption to gender binary, as a resistance to the normative". [12] As the mobile internet became ubiquitous in the early 2010s, theorists talked about the fallacy of “ digital dualism,” arguing against the idea that life online was any less authentic than life offline. Russell took this critique and ran with it, celebrating the very “real” potentials and possibilities that digital tools had opened up for queer identity, trans identity, and marginalized people in general. Davis, Ben (28 September 2020). " 'I Say Tear It All Down': Curator Legacy Russell on How 'Glitch Feminism' Can Be a Tool to Radically Reimagine the World". Artnet . Retrieved 22 August 2021. Gugliotta, Bobette (1971). Nolle Smith: Cowboy, Engineer, Statesman. Dodd, Mead. ISBN 9780396063902.

Issue No. 10

You write in the book, “Glitch is anti-body, resisting the body as a coercive social and cultural architecture.” That brought to mind all the discussions since the pandemic about what it means to be an “essential worker,” that it’s actually a privilege to have access to digital work and not have to show up as a body for work. That’s a question that your manifesto opens up for me: How do you balance embracing the liberating possibilities of cyber identity with the realities that some people’s means of survival make those inaccessible? a b Goldstein, Caroline (8 June 2021). "Rising Star Curator Legacy Russell Has Been Named Director of the Kitchen, New York's Influential Performance Art Space". Artnet News . Retrieved 22 August 2021. a b Lavender, Pandora (15 April 2019). "7 Questions: Legacy Russell". Frieze . Retrieved 2020-06-18. Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” The glitch announces: One is not born, but rather becomes, a body. Legacy Russell doesn’t do things IRL. Throughout her writing, you’ll find instead the term “AFK” (Away From Keyboard).