Glitch counters the systems where the maintenance of White cis-gendered bodies requires positing them as models worthy of aspiration. Russell’s earliest theorisation of the glitch was motivated by the idea of the glitch as petite mort or the kind of stoppages that shut it all down in jouissance and which sustain an always incomplete buffering of identities-in-formation. Now professionally based at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Russell deftly weaves together insights from diverse sources – her personal memoirs of online message boards, poets, (manuel arturo abreu, Essex Hemphill, Lucille Clifton, Walt Whitman), Black radical thought (Édouard Glissant, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten), as well as a critique of Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) – which have all informed her curatorial projects and criticism investigating artists who “glitch-up” techniques and technologies to deconstruct the hegemonic orders of gendered and racialised identities for capitalist extraction.Īgainst the popular idea of the glitch as an error which must be troubleshot out of existence, Russell posits glitch as an erratum, or necessary correction to the violence of systems that we are forced to consent to as being normative or neutral. Russell is a digital-native who writes candidly about beginning to become a self in the links where punk meets drag in the late 1990s/early 2000’s of New York City’s East Village, and just as the neighbourhood’s counter-cultures were succumbing to increasingly higher rents. The book is a celebratory homage to glitch’s refusal of negrophobic, patriarchal, capitalist forms of production. The manifesto is organised through a somatic theorisation of glitch that celebrates the phenomenon as a way to cut into oppressive systems and may offer possibilities to stitch together more consensual worlds. The book takes up twelve moments of glitch – as a metaphor, as a tool, and as a revolutionary attitude – spread over as many sections to offer an exegesis on a contemporary queer Black aesthetics. In Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) curator Legacy Russell thinks through the concept of “the glitch” to mediate a post-internet, non-binary, fourth-wave feminist poetics.
Useless we disappear, ghosting on the binary body. When we reject the binary, we claim uselessness as a strategic tool. When we reject the binary, we challenge how we are valued in a capitalist society that yokes our gender to the labor we enact. When we reject the binary, we reject the economy that goes along with it.