Illustration comprised of photographs by Travis Diehl of the cover of Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, and graphic by Anthony Boyd (https://www.anthonyboyd.graphics).
Last among the half dozen writers, artists, and theorists endorsing Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is a blurb from Lil Miquela: “Russell helps us understand that the components of our identity are in fact technologies. She offers a powerful shift in mindset that empowers a generation of activist remixers.” Among this company, Miquela is unique in one important respect: She isn’t a person. Miquela Sousa is a computer-generated model, musician, and influencer created by Brud (a self-styled robotics and Artificial Intelligence [AI] specialist company that is in fact an ad firm). As the avatar reaches into the physical world to give her imprimatur to the back of a softcover book, she also demonstrates one of Russell’s main themes: The online and the offline have merged to such an extent that it no longer makes sense—indeed, it’s actually discriminatory, even violent—to treat the online as in any way fake. (Russell picks up Nathan Jurgenson’s argument that “away from keyboard” [AFK] is a more appropriate term for “meatspace” than “in real life,” or IRL.) “This book is for those who are en route to becoming their avatars,” writes Russell, “those who continue to play, experiment, and build via the Internet as a means of strengthening the loop between online and AFK.”1 Given this argument, can we still say that one of its blurbs is not like the others?
Glitch Feminism proposes that images provoke errors in binary systems, thus freeing the flesh and making the corporeal secondary, or at least disassociating destiny from biology. Lil Miquela is the apotheosis of this: “We can see example [sic] of anti-body in the fictional character and ‘it girl’ Miquela Sousa, known via her Instagram personality Lil Miquela.”2 She is a “self” without a body. Yet she has AFK influence. “We wonder,” writes Russell, “what purpose can a body that has no body serve?”3 Miquela promotes (is made to promote) progressive causes, such as Black Lives Matter, Planned Parenthood, and the Equal Rights Amendment, in line with her young, urban “cohort” or target audience—she is forever 19 and “lives” in Los Angeles.4 She frequents Seven-Eleven, enjoys Haribo gummies and Takis corn chips, and appears in a range of indie designer clothes.
The main vector of the glitch’s feminism is networked technology that enables users to self-identify in ways that blur binaries—between online and off, say—and especially the gender binary. “And so my twelve-year-old self became sixteen, became twenty, became seventy,” Russell writes in the evocative introduction. “I aged. I died.” Russell updates cyberfeminism, itself an update of a previous wave’s wetware, for a generation who grew up and found themselves “while the rainbow wheel of death buffered in the ecstatic, dawdling jam of AOL dial-up” as much as in clubs and warehouses.5 Hers is a generation of cyborgs, terminals in hand. But this embrace also demonstrates how Russell reprises early cyberfeminism’s overly optimistic view of technology—its strategic ambivalence toward the companies that “provide” the technology of online identity, platforms like Facebook/Instagram, MySpace, livejournal, and AOL. Cyberspace is a given; so too is capitalism, which after all is what makes the former possible.
To some extent, Russell acknowledges that “a body that has no body” is no easy feat, and requires a team of entrepreneurs, animators, programmers, and sponsors. “In the face of an increasingly privatized world,” she writes of Miquela, “can a corporate avatar—in essence, a privatized body, symbolic in form—be an authentic advocate, a catalyst toward social change?”6 What is an influencer, anyway? A model? An ad? Here too, Russell argues that a prejudice against the virtual is anachronistic, a dead end. Regardless of the image’s “truth,” brands affect physical bodies. “On the one hand,” Russell writes, “it could be argued that Lil Miquela epitomizes a perverse intersection of consumer capitalism and advocacy.”7 Miquela promotes far more clothes, shops, and brands than causes; indeed, Russell glosses over the real problems of virtual activism supplanting AFK and the related “trend” in influencers like Kim Kardashian making selective and well-publicized forays into issues such as mass incarceration. “On the other,” continues Russell, “she, being AI and therefore ‘without’ a body, epitomizes what becomes possible with avatar performativity.” Tellingly, Russell here slips into Brud’s own post-truth adspeak, calling Lil Miquela an AI rather than accurately (if cynically) describing her as an avatar or puppet or corporate mascot. For the sake of Russell’s argument, Miquela is too good to be true. Lil Miquela represents—is—“a newfangled opportunity to make visible the invisible, to engage with new audiences, to push the limits of corporeal materiality and reconsider how we might (re)define the body as we have always known it.” Corporeal—and corporate, too.
Lil Miquela. Courtesy of Brud.
It’s certainly easier for a business to “exploit” a spokesperson who doesn’t have a body of their own—to manage or employ a pure image rather than a body-bound one. (Brud winks at their anti-labor gambit in a post that shows Miquela behind a laptop in their open-plan office, “working.”) Nor are Lil Miquela’s politics as simple as Russell’s brief treatment suggests. An uncomfortable “reveal” occurred in 2018, when Miquela’s Trumpite, white, blonde, CGI coworker hijacked her account and demanded she tell her followers “the truth.” Lil Miquela then came out to her fans—as a “robot.” Or rather, her handlers at Brud made her perform a searching ambivalence, an identity crisis, for Instagram. “I’m not sure I can comfortably identify as a woman of color,” posted Miquela in a comment. “‘Brown’ was a choice made by a corporation. ‘Woman’ was an option on a computer screen. my identity was a choice Brud made in order to sell me to brands, to appear ‘woke.’ I will never forgive them. I don’t know if I will ever forgive myself.”8 And yet, this crisis soon faded into the digital past of the feed. The self-healing reflexivity of Brud’s galaxy-brain performative wokeness is astounding. And what about when bodies get involved? Less than a year later, Brud had straight cis model Bella Hadid and Lil Miquela “kiss” in a Calvin Klein ad (for which the clothing brand later apologized).9 The AI adbot remains the driverless car of influencers, always promised but never quite delivered. Still, rather than engage the murk of Lil Miquela’s ethics, Russell keeps moving, blurring the blurb.
Russell grew up “wandering the highways of haunted machinery, occupying chat rooms and building GeoCities GIF fantasies.” She also grew up “on Saint Mark’s Place in the center of the East Village,” schooled by drag queens, punks, and Boricuas.10 Gradually, as the Lower East Side gentrified, “creative families of color like [Russell’s] who had built the vibrant landscape of downtown New York” found themselves priced out by “a generation of trust-fund children.” Russell writes that these largely white newcomers “were intrigued by the mythology of the East Village as a cultural bastion” even as they blithely trampled its reality.11 Although she does not make the connection, the same could be said for the internet of the GeoCities era. The ad hoc academic networks of the 1980s that grounded the utopian thinking of early cyberfeminists, such as Donna Haraway, and the still-wild HTML of theorists Sadie Plant, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Fisher of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU, 1995–97), now comprise the ruins beneath the walled gardens and redeveloped wharfs of Facebook, Google, and Apple.12 Online as AFK, moneyed concerns move in to quantify the underground.
As the world tried to sort Russell into a series of ever-smaller boxes, she learned to understand “the binary,” and gender in particular, as “some kind of fiction” used to constrict human potential.13 If the machine of capitalism requires this binary in order to sort and digest the subject, then the glitch refuses that machine. “A glitch is an error, a mistake, a failure to function.”14 “The glitch is a form of refusal. Within glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.”15 “The glitch is an activist prayer, a call to action, as we work toward fantastic failure, breaking free of an understanding of gender as something stationary.”16 “As glitch feminists,” Russell writes, “this is our politic: we refuse to be hewn to the hegemonic line of a binary body.”17 And, finally: “Glitch feminism dissents, pushes back against capitalism.”18
It does this, she argues, primarily by exceeding capitalism’s binary categories in a way that the machine can’t process. The internet is the infrastructure best able to conduct such transformations. The machine, though, is digital—and the digital, coded to speak in 0s and 1s, is inherently binary. “When we reject the binary,” Russell writes, “we reject the economy that goes along with it.”19 But can you reject the economy without breaking the machine that runs it? Russell is ambivalent. Citing Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call in The Undercommons (2013) to “tear this shit down completely and build something new,” Russell asks, “Can a break be a form of building something new? Can our breaking shit be a correction, too?”20 “Let the whole goddamn thing short-circuit,” she writes in the final chapter—titled “Glitch Survives.” The persistent problem is how to not only survive, but live, when the systems that allow certain freedoms—capitalism, one way or another—also limit them. Throughout the manifesto, Russell is more likely to attempt to exist in the paradox than tear it down. Where the machine is binary, for example, “glitch is virus”: a program that at once breaks and interrupts and even refuses the machine’s smooth function, but that also relies on its logic, redirecting it, holding it hostage, subverting it, siphoning it off for new, outré uses. The virus uses its host to survive, and to proliferate. But if the virus kills its host (too quickly), the virus dies with it.
The glitch often reads like an alternative to a world with alternatives. “For most people under twenty in Europe and North America,” writes Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism, “the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable.”21 Russell may have Lil Miquela in mind when she calls out “The paradox of using platforms that grossly co-opt, sensationalize, and capitalize on POC [people of color], female-identifying, and queer bodies (and our pain) as a means of advancing urgent political or cultural dialogue about our struggle (in addition to our joys and our journeys).”22 Yet this paradox, at least for now, is the world. Russell refuses malaise at the same time she refuses novelty: in between these poles, “glitch is remix.” Fisher: “What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.”23 When Russell writes, “We strive for oozing, challenging bodies full of seams. We want wild, amorous, monstrous bodies,” she recalls Fisher’s description of capitalism as “a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact.”24
Tabita Rezaire, Afro-Cyber Resistance, 2014. Video still. Video, color, sound, 18:26 min. Courtesy of the artist.
Here again, Russell’s book is open to criticisms also leveled at early cyber-feminism—that its view of the internet, cyberspace, cybernetics, androids, implants, drugs, and their potentials for new selves is too rosy, considering that many of these innovations are toys passed down secondhand by military labs. Russell sees this: “The same is true online as AFK. All technology reflects the society that produces it, including its power structures and prejudices. This is true all the way down to the level of the algorithm.”25 Thus, Donna Haraway’s 1985 Cyborg Manifesto argues for thinking past the limitations of gender, technology, “the human”—and its feminism arises from its critique of essentializing the qualities and roles of “men” and “women,” such as child-rearing. Glitch Feminism is also feminist in this sense—feminist without privileging “the female.” But how to do this on contemporary “platforms” where, “On and offline, the boxes we tick, the forms we complete, the profiles we build” are all concessions to being free in other ways? “We are standing inside the machine,” Russell writes, “and every day we make a choice whether or not to rob ourselves.”26 Those choices, like the glitch that would refuse them, keep changing. Glitches, recuperated by the corporation, become options. “Facebook’s fifty-eight gender options (and three pronouns, lest we forget!), first made available for users in 2014, was not a radical gesture—it was neoliberalism at its finest.”27 Adding more names, more defaults, more boxes—a granular intensification of the data available to exploit—is a sort of gentrification of the glitch. Russell points to how the racism encoded in the dataset resulted in a Google algorithm labeling Black faces as gorillas. But the technology will get better—if not less racist, then better at masking its racism. If “non-binary” isn’t a marketing category yet, it will be.
The digitally “embodied” Lil Miquela is the binary machine trying to put us at ease by speaking our analog language. Indeed, Russell’s point that an online-AFK duality is beyond useless has long been mainstream. The issue of the Economist on shelves when Glitch Feminism landed includes a report on the success of augmented reality driven by gaming engines. The piece begins with an account of a concert by Travis Scott held live in Fortnite: “Mr Scott’s performance took place in a world, of sorts,” they write—“not merely on a screen.”28 The article notes that, due to COVID-19, weddings have been held in Animal Crossing, college classes in Minecraft. The confluence of online and AFK seems like a given. Zoom is ubiquitous. It isn’t “the same,” of course, but it is real. Is any of this a glitch? Or is it the “system” working as intended? It is both. Russell is right that it doesn’t matter if a cause or a brand is promoted by an avatar or a “real” person—whether an influencer has a body or not.
Russell gives a brief history of cyberfeminism in the first chapter: “Early cyberfeminists echoed early AFK first-wave feminist rhetoric in being phobic of transnational allyship. The public face of cyberfeminism was regularly championed and fetishized as one of white womanhood.”29 Cyberfeminism had the same racist shortsightedness as “universal” social movements before and after, something that Glitch Feminism tries to correct. In Russell’s formulation: “white women = producing white theory = producing white cyberspace.” At the same time, she reminds us that Blackness and Black queer womanhood have maintained an image of how to both advance and critique feminism. “We cannot forget,” she writes, “it was, and continues to be, the presence of blackness that aided in establishing a primary precedent for the notion of intersectionality within feminism.”30
Russell mentions a handful of antecedents in passing, like Sadie Plant (but not the CCRU) and the cyberfeminist collective subRosa. She omits others, such as Laboria Cuboniks, authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto (which appeared in print in 2018 from the same press that gives us Russell’s book—with a blurb from Mark Fisher). Xenofeminism seems particularly relevant, not only because it is one of the most recent feminist manifestos and accounts for shifts in Web 3.0, the military-industrial and pharmacopornographic complexes, and aesthetic theory but also because its metaphors seem so compatible with Russell’s. Xenofeminism’s “interruption” and “overflow” have their corollaries in capitalism and in computation; and its metaphors of technological enhancement and “mutation” suggest a kind of biological, physiological refusal akin to the glitch. Anticipating Russell, Laboria Cuboniks writes, “Technology isn’t inherently progressive.” In order for it to become so, “Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role.”31 (To this list Russell would rightly add people of color.) But although it speaks in these vernaculars, Russell’s book is not a history of (cyber)feminism nor a work of feminist theory. It is a manifesto.
This is not the only reason Glitch Feminism passes over the intricacies of its precedents—like subRosa’s Domain Errors, a collection of cyberfeminist theory, or Lil Miquela’s own Club 404, a line of merch for creatives, both of which reference bad, broken, or misplaced links and websites—and how they underpin the glitch.32 “The etymology of glitch finds its deep roots in the Yiddish gletshn (to slide, glide, slip) or the German glitschen (slippy),” she writes. “Glitch is thus an active word, one that implies movement and change from the outset; this movement triggers error.”33 It also bypasses contradiction and short-circuits argument. Hence the manifesto’s desire to inhabit this superposition, the space of desire itself. “Perhaps what these institutions—both online and off—require is not dismantling,” writes Russell, “but rather mutiny in the form of strategic occupation.”34 Glitch, the semantics of: to break, but also to move (into or through). The word works like “ghost,” to haunt, to persist, but also to reject, to passively refuse, to disappear. “As glitch feminists,” she writes, “we want to ghost the binary body.”35 In more ways than two. She describes “a dance floor at 4AM, that moment where in the crush of all-bodies lit up under strobes like firecrackers, we become no-body, and in the gorgeous crush of no-body, we become every-body.”36 Gender and fashion, bodies and drugs blur together into a collectively authored hallucination—the way William Gibson describes cyberspace in Neuromancer (1984) or Reena Spaulings describe the New York City of the early aughts. The blur is the movement by which “we consent not to be a single being frozen in binary code.”37 It is also a form of capitalist realism. “Still,” Russell writes, “the machinic bias enacted by the panopticon of the mapping of the body through digital technologies is filled with hopeful holes.”38 “Action is pointless,” writes Fisher. “Only senseless hope makes sense.”39 Do I contradict myself? Very well…
The question of the glitch, then, is ultimately not a matter of escape from or destruction of the capitalist machine, nor is it an unambivalent embrace of or mere survival within it. The glitch is a matter of consent: “At these fault lines surface questions of consent—yours, mine, ours—as we continue to ‘opt-in,’ feeding our ‘selves’ (e.g., our bodies as represented or performed online) into these channels.”40 Like Walt Whitman, containing multitudes, we survive and thrive by having selves to spare.41 In fact, Russell turns to Whitman’s “Song of Myself” at key points in her book, beginning, in the first chapter, as a way to describe the capaciousness reserved for white cis men by the patriarchy (even as “Whitman, a white man, was considered radically queer for his time”).42 Whitman serves as a sort of prototype for the self with multiple selves, a canonized example of the right to “contain multitudes” that glitch feminism demands. Just as importantly, Whitman’s “very well” establishes contradiction in the affirmative. It is in art that the self/selves has long rephrased the machine’s charges of otherness, deviancy, and contradiction as assent.
It follows that Russell’s manifesto, its claims and its resistance, are largely phrased in terms of contemporary art. Like fashion, like online images, art transacts in the blur between image and material—the limen of desire—that would maintain a state of being not one thing or another but both, or several at once. Russell’s introduction states that her book will explore how “life not only imitates, but begins with art.”43 As tech startups and the Economist have moved opportunistically beyond a tired divide between online and AFK, the same is true within art’s specialist milieus for other virtual forms, from the novel, to video, to language itself. The glitch reiterates art’s ambivalence about simultaneously celebrating and critiquing “the institution” and “politics,” where endorsement looks like critique and critique also serves to endorse.
Amalia Ulman, Excellences & Perfections (detail), 2014. Screenshot of WARC archive of performance on Instagram. Courtesy of Rhizome.
Russell makes an example of Excellences & Perfections (2014), an Instagram-based performance by Amalia Ulman in which the Argentinian artist undertook to pass as an upwardly mobile millennial woman. Ulman staged selfies in hotel lobbies and faked a breast augmentation, among other examples of what Russell calls “the staid and troubled tropes of ‘bubble-gum feminism’ . . . projections of a gendered white body packaged and consumed for cultural capital.”44 The con here had to do with a narrow band of class-based, white identity; otherwise, “Ulman did not disrupt or provide substantive feedback to the status quo, but rather her performance, basic as ever, reveled in it.” It may be that Ulman’s main innovation was to slide this “high-femme performance” from the realm of basic social media into an art world more or less keen to embrace its ambivalence.45 “Few looking at Ulman’s Instagram could tell the difference between art and life,” Russell observes, “and so the work itself—confirming that, yes, white femme ascendancy still had an audience—was only made profound by the artworld calling it so.”46
SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, Mirror-mirror_(newGen_TechEdit)blackbitch1.png, 2015. Portable network graphic, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.
As a rejoinder to Ulman’s project, Russell poses an Instagram-based piece by the artist SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY, who does what the author describes as “important work in shaking to the core the contradictions in how gendered and racialized bodies are ‘read’ or rendered (in)visible by various publics on the Internet.” In picking skin: alignment (2015), HOLLOWAY transposed a 1985 work by Carrie Mae Weems into the digital era, captioning selfies (or rather photos taken of the Photobooth app on a laptop screen, as if in a mirror) of her own Black-presenting body with the following words (after Weems): “LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR, THE BLACK WOMAN ASKED, ‘MIRROR, MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL?’ THE MIRROR SAYS, ‘SNOW WHITE YOU BLACK BITCH, AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT.’” For Russell, HOLLOWAY’s work signifies “the action of self-representation (e.g., ‘putting on’ different skins toward performing different selves) as still subject to the perforation of a pop visual culture and art history that enacts violence upon the black femme body by affirming models of aestheticized white beauty as foremost.”47 On the other hand—and perhaps in a Whitmanesque, white way—Ulman’s performance achieved a similar efficacy. Broadly speaking, HOLLOWAY provoked the same algorithm (both AFK and online) of sorting, qualifying, and controlling that upvotes white cis femininity and downvotes its Black queer refusal. “The blur between Ulman’s ‘excellences [and] perfections’ on- versus offline made this as a performance a jagged pill to swallow,” writes Russell. Perhaps “blur” is not the best word. She writes, “To seize ‘multiple selves’ is, therefore, an inherently feminist act: multiplicity is a liberty.”48 But Ulman’s online performance mapped too “perfectly” onto her AFK self; rather, one could think of Ulman’s performance as a claiming of multitudes that carries less risk for her than for others. Russell makes this explicit in her discussion of the artist E. Jane, who released an LP as the online avatar MHYSA and now performs those songs live. “What E. Jane fiercely protects—that expansive self—Whitman dons fearlessly, wholly unconcerned with the threat of having privilege taken from him.”49
Such problems of unequally distributed visibility is where the glitch, as Russell’s third chapter has it, “throws shade.” She discusses Juliana Huxtable, an artist whose practice of self-portraiture, poetry, and nightlife has earned her a huge following. “A GIF traveled virally online, emoting via the eternal loop of digital affect, quoting Huxtable’s reaction to the question, ‘What’s the nastiest shade ever thrown?’ to which she replies, ‘Existing in the world.’”50 The glitch throws shade by appearing at all. Then again, Russell glides over the question of representation—who “owns” the image, beyond or under its link or loop to the body. (The body, she acknowledges at another point, may be the only thing we truly own “under the sun of capitalism.”51) Russell cites Frank Benson’s well-known sculpture of Huxtable in the Grecian, Western classical pose of the reclining hermaphrodite, painted a glittering green. “Huxtable herself is a glitch,” she writes, “and a powerful one at that.” But this sculpture also played to the legibility of Western art history and into the “algorithm” of the cis white male gaze—if not the gaze in general. Indeed, in the space between Glitch Feminism’s completion and its release, Huxtable herself picked up the critique that Russell passed over, tweeting that Benson’s 2013 “homage to Huxtable” (as Russell characterizes it) had left her feeling exploited.52
MHYSA performing live at NRMAL 14, Mexico City, March 3–4, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Molly Blackbird.
As the glitch slides and elides, enacting what the Xenofeminist Manifesto calls “a transformation of seeping, directed subsumption rather than rapid overthrow,” Russell’s manifesto struggles to both celebrate and critique technology.53 Art is one way—not out, but through. Russell notes how one artist rides the algorithm to the top of Google, and in a sense the canon, because they changed their name to American Artist. Art is an image without a body, or somehow unbound from the body that it represents—but also beholden, linked to it, and to the problems of representation that persist in the “loop between online and AFK.”54 Indeed, Lil Miquela not only plumps for fashion brands, snacks, and progressive causes. She also has appeared at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles with Klaus Biesenbach in front of a Barbara Kruger mural; perusing the bookshop at Los Angeles performance space NAVEL with Hans Ulrich Obrist; and in a Scene & Herd-style photo op sandwiched between Jerry Saltz and Marilyn Minter. Do I embrace capitalism even as I critique it? Very well . . . The glitch’s Whitmanesque ambivalence is what makes life possible. “The glitch is a passage,” Russell writes, “through which the body traverses toward liberation, a tear in the fabric of the digital.”55 It is also like the voiceover of a Calvin Klein ad, “Life is about opening doors—creating new dreams you never knew would exist,” as Bella Hadid pulls Lil Miquela close for a kiss.
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Travis Diehl has lived in Los Angeles since 2009. He is a recipient of the Andy Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant and the Rabkin Prize in Visual Art Journalism. He is Online Editor at X-TRA.