Glitch Feminism, a Thread.

In 2012 Legacy Russell--writer, artist, and now Associate Curator of Exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem--introduced the idea of Glitch Feminism. “Digital Dualism and the Glitch Feminism Manifesto” unpacks a perspective on feminism which leverages the errors and systematic failures wrought by the pre-existing “economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization.” The theory is expanded on in “Elsewhere, After the Flood: Glitch Feminism and the Genesis of Glitch Body Politic” for Rhizome, where the glitch is atomized in the body and expressed in our digital and physical interactions.

To unpack some of the ideas behind Glitch Feminism, we exchanged emails with Legacy. The “rules” of the thread are a mashup of Telephone/Exquisite Corpse/The Drawing Game where we alternate between text and image responses.

*Hover over text to reveal additional comments.*

Ibiayi Briggs to
Legacy, Lorraine

“A Glitch Feminist acknowledges the value of visuality, and the revolutionary role that digital practice has in expanding the construction, deconstruction, and re-presentation of the female-identifying corpus. We acknowledge that the rigidity of digital dualism needs to be retired, as it plays into binaries of real/virtual that parallel the rampantly socialized figuration of male/female.”

I'm going to kick off the thread with a quote from Legacy's 2012 article Digital Dualism and the Glitch Feminism Manifesto. I was particularly drawn to this passage because it calls attention to the importance of the image as a tool to understand feminism. Not just the synthesis of images, but also their creation, manipulation, and dissemination—something that's fully in the architect/designer's wheelhouse.

Legacy Russell to
Ibiayi, Lorraine

Lorraine Gemino to
Legacy, Ibiayi

"There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination—in order to act potently."
- Donna Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto.

Ibiayi Briggs to
Legacy, Lorraine

Is this cheating? lol

LaTurbo Avedon, Estuary

Legacy Russell to
Ibiayi, Lorraine

Lorraine Gemino to
Legacy, Ibiayi

This is from the short film Pumzi. The main character feels contempt for the oppressive but advanced institution. She later seeks a way to connect back to "living" and the natural world.

>

Ibiayi Briggs to
Lorraine, Legacy

"What would happen if you couldn't forget, if every emotion from every person whose grief you'd eaten came back up? It could happen, if something went wrong with the formula millions and millions of permutations down the line. A thousand falling men landing on you."

I've been obsessed with this short story since I read it about a year ago. Arimah imagines a future where climate change has transformed North America and Europe into ocean, and their refugees repeat the sins of their ancestors by recolonizing parts of Africa. Hope and survival are tethered to a mathematic formula that has given men the ability to fly and also allows an elite group of mathematicians to draw out and consume trauma as if solving an equation. The story makes me think of a lot of things, but now I'm thinking about it as the algorithms that influence so much of our life. While the techno-positivism is fading away how can we confront the pile up of shitty algorithmic decisions and find peace in what seems to be an all-encompassing digital malaise?

- What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky by Lesley Nneka Arimah (also brilliantly read by Levar Burton in Episode 5 of his podcast)

Legacy Russell to
Ibiayi, Lorraine

Lorraine Gemino to
Legacy, Ibiayi

“We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.” - Gilles Deleuze

I was introduced to "Negotiations" by Giles Deleuze through Jenny Odell's How to do Nothing. The act of nothing seems necessary to focus on the necessary.

Follow us on ︎ARE.NA