The Glitch Strikes Back Legacy Russell’s Feminist Manifesto
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Although the exact meaning can shift depending on context, the word glitch always gestures to a problem. It is a short-lived technical fault; an undetected error. To most, the glitch is a nuisance. For curator and writer Legacy Russell, the glitch is a glorious invitation, and the subject of her just- released debut book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. Russell defines the glitch as a creative strategy informed by and for queer, trans, and nonbinary communities of color that are systematically oppressed by white capitalist heteropatriarchal forces. In a 2012 essay titled “Digital Dualism and the Glitch Feminism Manifesto” for the online journal The Society Pages, Russell builds on her interpretation of the term, encapsulating a worldview in which the online space can offer the keys to liberation. Russell’s original article was partly informed by a 2011 essay by theorist Nathan Jurgenson, also published by The Society Pages, in which he termed the phrase “digital dualism.” For Jurgenson, the term describes a cultural belief in the divide between online and IRL spaces—the digital world understood as “unreal” in contrast to the physical world. Jurgenson argues against the idea that our online selves are separate, inauthentic constructions bearing no impact on our real lives, and instead points to our digital personas as actualized facets of our personhood. He signals these slippages by replacing IRL with AFK (away from keyboard), implying a continuity between digital and physical.¹ Jurgenson’s critique encouraged Russell’s gesticulating thoughts around
Allison Noelle Conner
digital play and self-actualization. Born and raised in New York City, Russell spent her formative years roaming the internet “as a digital Orlando, shapeshifting, time-traveling, genderfucking as [she] saw fit.”² The internet held her experiments, and she was able to stretch the limits of her Blackness, queerness, and femmeness in ways that were not possible away from the keyboard. Fusing memoir and Black feminist theory, Russell’s book draws parallels between technological error and the ways people are coded as “faulty” if they are unwilling to assimilate into hegemonic culture. The glitch is presented as a political framework, an elastic term used to describe a revolt against the status quo. It is refusal, nonperformance, malfunction. The book dares us to embrace the failures that upset the systems of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and more. The internet plays an essential role in accelerating these deliberate disruptions, providing an expansive forum for new worlds and futures: “Glitch feminism demands an occupation of the digital as a means of world-building.”³ Despite Russell’s reverence for the possibilities of an online world, Glitch Feminism reminds us that the same binary-obsessed oppressive social systems running amok AFK— anti-Blackness, sexism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism—have also spilled into the digital sphere. She moves beyond the utopian visions of ’90s cyberfeminists like Sadie Plant and VNS Matrix, who sought to transcend the limits imposed by patriarchy and sexism through the intersection of art and technology. Their efforts towards a liberatory internet were marred by their own exclusions: the centering of white cis womanhood further marginalized the cyber experiences of queer people, trans people, and people of color.⁴ In contrast, Glitch Feminism presents the online world as a complicated in-between space that holds the capacity for both revolution and oppression. The glitch reminds us that while we can use the digital to architect our dreams 1. Nathan Jurgenson, “Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity,” The Society Pages, September 13, 2011, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/ 2011/09/13/digital-dualism-and-the-fallacy-ofweb-objectivity/.
