Glitching the “Real”
An interview of Legacy Russell on cyberfeminism, becoming your avatar, and how refusal transforms the current world order
Photo by Mina Alyeshmerni, courtesy of Legacy Russell
Legacy Russell came of age on the internet. Traversing teenagehood in a rapidly gentrifying East Village, the writer and curator found sanctuary in chatrooms and GeoCities: protected spaces for “politicking via my baby gender play, traveling without a passport, taking up space, amplifying my queer blackness.” In a world ordered by the surveilling logics of white heteronormativity, the internet—what Russell refers to as “the skin of the digital”—gave way to unruly, fluid, and indeterminate futures.
Expanding on a 2012 manifesto that first coined the term, Russell’s new book Glitch Feminism upends the notion of “glitch-as-error,” reapplying the term in a cyberfeminist context to explore how the glitch disrupts the governance of race, gender, and sexuality. The book expands on Russell’s original manifesto in 12 points: glitch as refusal, cosmic, throwing shade, ghosting, error, encrypting, anti-body, skin, virus, mobilizing, remixing, and surviving. Both a strategy and an ideal, the glitch is a vehicle through which to actualize oneself online and thus become active in the physical world.
Glitch Feminism is a pocketbook, guide, and beautiful envisioning of a radical art history. Inspired by a tradition of artists pushing the world to its brink, from American Artist and Sondra Perry to Juliana Huxtable and Tabita Rezaire, Russell surveys the digital culture of Black, queer, femme, and gender non-conforming practitioners “who, in their rebellion against the binary body, guide us through wayward worlds toward a fresh and exciting future.” In the social and cultural spaces of the internet, denizens of the digital find the creative material to rupture a binary system and trouble the violences of embodiment.
A blend of memoir, critical theory, art, and poetry, Glitch Feminism itself is a corrective to those coercive architectures and histories that seek to flatten our plurality of being. What does a visual economy look like that protects Black queers and femmes? Russell suggests that, by holding our aesthetics with care, we might interrupt racial capitalism’s impetuous rehearsals of violent imagery and, in turn, step into more liveable, wonderful worlds.
We had the chance to ask Russell some questions about embracing the glitch, why cyberspace is “real,” and how to leave our flesh behind.
—ATM
ATM: Why is the manifesto form important for glitch feminism?
Legacy Russell: Manifestos allow for a certain type of political imaginary. They are ambitious and poetic. They take on things that feel impossible and outsized and allow us to stand both outside and in the center of them. They are both rhetorical and concrete. For me, this book is intended to be a call to action, an opportunity, a reaching dream toward bettering our present and future realities. Manifestos and artists share in being able to be epic and vast and help us play, experiment, innovate. This is why the book brings artists into the landscape of the manifesto, to really let things get wonderful and weird, to color outside the lines a bit.
The reader doesn’t have to be complicit in the text—in fact, there may be many readers who will struggle with it or fight against what it proposes. My hope is that whether the reader is involved and willing to co-conspire and collaborate in the thought and premise therein, or if the reader takes a stand against it, that they will still engage it, and consider its politic as a useful framework toward shifting systems of power, visibility, and representation across art history and visual culture. Glitch Feminism as it exists is both manifesto and erratum—it’s a correction to an incomplete history of the digital, a recognition that we still have so much more work to do toward telling these stories and having them live on as a collective chorus through and beyond the internet.
manuel arturo abreu, 2014 tweet, courtesy of the artist/Glitch Feminism, Russell
If a reader “takes a stand against it,” it seems that’s because Glitch Feminism is a stand against some common conceptions about the internet: on the one hand, that the digital is a fantasy space and, on the other, that new technologies are inherently alienating. Why is cyberspace so full of potential?
Glitch feminism isn’t naive. It isn’t looking to reinforce the myth of a utopic internet. Instead, it recognizes that we are living in a world, in a culture, that doesn’t always do the work to care for or love us. This means that we continue to be responsible for creating and protecting our own spaces where we can consider differently how to move, make, live, survive, thrive. In a moment where movement continues to be a divisive issue across race, class, and gender, the internet remains a pivotal meeting place. The potential there is a ripe one if we consider differently how we might strategically apply our presence across the digital.
This potential is also rooted in your refusal of the idea that on- and off-line are separate. You borrow Nathan Jurgenson’s term AFK (away from keyboard) to describe what is sometimes referred to as IRL (in real life). What is the problem with the latter term, and how does AFK work to undermine, as you put it, “the fetishization of ‘real life””?
I think the notion of “real life” is problematic in many ways when we talk about the internet and digital culture. Firstly, it suggests that the things that happen online aren’t real, which just isn’t factual. Secondly, it suggests that if blackness and queerness is building community digitally online that somehow it is less sustainable or valuable than if it takes place in physical space; this is ironic and problematic given that Black space and queer space continue to be systemically under threat—surveilled, regulated, closed down altogether. For Black people and queer people to take to the digital as a creative material and a site of collective congregation and expression, it is born equally of necessity and desire. “AFK”—away from keyboard—as Jurgenson proposes in his argument against digital dualism is not just a matter of nuance, it is underscoring the politic that lies in the language we deploy. Life away from our screens is just that—a life away from our screens. But life online is still life, and so much happens there that informs the realities of physical space, and vice versa.
This connects to your broader point about visibility: while the gaze may be racist, homophobic, and all around violent, experimenting in our digital skins is an endeavor of desiring, slipping in and out of, and collectivizing around new identities. I’m interested in how illegibility might break the “weight of incessant white heteronormative observation.”
It feels important to recognize that demanding legibility is a strategy of the state. This question of “illegibility” intersects with ongoing discussions of opacity, ways where we might think through what is made visible versus what is hidden, what is kept known and read versus what is encrypted for a select audience toward changing the supremacy of systems.
Tabita Rezaire, “Afro-Cyber Resistance,” video still, 2014, courtesy of the artist/Glitch Feminism, Russell
A lot of the time the Internet feels individualizing, but rethinking the “real” points us in a new direction: glitch feminism is a call for collective liberation via the digital. What does it mean to make digital reality live?
I’m thinking here of artists in the book like American Artist who quite literally lives as an avatar—they’re a real human who lives and breathes away from their screen, but they’ve assumed a name as an avatar, a means of shifting the logics of representation and visibility across an American art history as it surfaces through Search Engine Optimization online, quite literally changing what that looks like and what shows up when people go online to search for “american artist.” Or E. Jane [also in the book], whose alter-ego “Mhysa” embodies a sort of pop star diva persona and empowers them to travel differently as a Black femme through time and space. These artists borrow from, as you say, a “digital reality,” but it bleeds so fully and completely into their lives AFK. This is powerful, and empowered.
I’m struck by how you reimagine the body—what you describe as both an idea, and something that is “inconceivably vast.” There is a certain political power in realizing that the body is cosmic. How does the glitch allow us to reject the economy that comes along with the binary body?
The body is really symbolic. I think people sometimes gawk at this as a proposition, they’re like, “But I’m in my body, how is my body a symbol? I’m real. Symbols aren’t real.” But symbols are very, very real. The body symbolizes different politics, it holds different projections, it makes assumptions about race, class, ability, and gender. When we choose to empty the body of its symbolism and consider differently how it might be reconstituted, that is part of this question of “uselessness,” a sort of failure to function as a symbol or icon, an insistence to complicate the territory of the body by taking up space, by considering how to be vast, and wild, and multitudinous. “Functionality” is an economy, its framework makes the world work. What does it mean to refuse to function, to perform, under these current world conditions? How can that brokenness be generative?
E. Jane “NOPE (a manifesto),” courtesy of the artist/Glitch Feminism, Russell
Glitch Feminism calls on the impulses of our inner child. The book is invested in the wonders, crises, and curiosities of the user; you call the internet a “playground,” and open with reflections of “tweenage” you logging on as “LuvPunk12.” Does “playing” require crisis, or vice versa?
Hm, I feel that this language of “crisis” is a little coercive and perhaps if misinterpreted could support the idea of crisis being required to manufacture in order to experiment, play, or innovate. I don’t believe this. What I recognize, what the book recognizes, is that we’ve lived under crisis and precarity as a “natural” state for decades, centuries even. It then is assumed that crisis is an organic way of being in the world. That is a flawed and abusive logic. We’ve become catatonic consenting to this sort of quotidian violence, the incessant chaos of crisis. It keeps us exhausted and distracted, hopeless and “in line.” But a better world really wouldn’t require crisis as a catalyst toward connecting with, as you say “our inner child.” A better world would let us live an ecstatic, playful life unapologetically, and bend to itself to that type of imagination as the natural or organic state of being.
Before we wrap up, I want to ask about how you situate glitch politics within a history of feminist cultural work. As you point out, the “waves” narrative of feminism largely serves the institution that is mainstream feminism—but the book is also in conversation with (and a critical intervention to) a long history of feminist thought.
The book looks to bring together a bunch of different strands of theory, poetics, and thought to live together. You know that game “if you could have anyone at the dinner party, who would it be?” This is the dinner party. It brings Black and queer contributions to the mutually urgent question of an empowered feminist selfhood as it intersects with cyberculture. All of this is loud, it crashes into one another in the most decadent and joyful way. Glitch feminism pays homage to a broader history of feminism, but also recognizes that feminism in its foundation, and the definition of “woman,” really was an exclusionary politic. The glitch wants to do better, to encourage us to recognize the work of blackness and queerness toward the emancipatory gains of a feminist movement as it has existed, exists now, will continue to exist.
Glitch Feminism cover design by Elizabeth Karp-Evans/Pacific, courtesy of Verso
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