TCHED TCHED Since the early ‘90s, cyberfeminist artists and activists have been concerned with the ways that gender and technology interact, how identity construction was complicated by the birth and rise of the Internet. However, as the Internet expanded, new issues surrounding cyber culture came to the surface, such as the limitations to visually represent race online, identity tourism, and algorithmic discrimintation. In the new millennium, cyberfeminism as it was no longer served Black, brown, and queer individuals left at the margins of technology. Enter Glitch Feminism. In her 2020 book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, artist and curator Legacy Russell describes this socio-techno concept as a creative and political exploration of how the Internet can expand—or ‘glitch’—the construct of the binary body. At the crossroads of social deviance theories and disability studies’ rejection of mind/body dualism, Glitch is a uniquely Black, queer, and feminist tool for understanding the ways historically ‘othered’ bodies disrupt and transform norms on and offline.1 In a social system corrupted by racial, sexual, and economic oppression, the ‘glitched’ body—one that is cosmic rather than corporeal, one that hacks the code of gender—is not an error at all, but instead a much needed departure.
Glitch Feminism most notably argues against “digital dualism,” or the idea that life online can be considered separate or less authentic from life offline, and instead, celebrates the very real possibilities that digital spaces create for marginalized individuals. Through the material of the Internet, Russell was able to stretch the limits of her Blackness, queerness, and femmeness in ways that were not possible AFK—or “away from keyboard.”1 Embodying the logic of error means viewing malfunction as an invitation for new possibilities, and doing so makes it possible to experience the multiplicity of self, to reclaim what has previously been defined as faulty by dominant society. Several artists online and AFK have explored the ways their own glitched bodies inhabit and challenge their spaces. Drag artist Victoria Sin utilizes performance, film, and speculative fiction to deconstruct the limits of the body. In their stylized and exaggerated presentation of self, Sin becomes their avatar through, what Russell describes as, the “gloss of digital drag,” celebrating the dilemma of their queer body as “necessarily visible, fantastically femme, larger than life, and
