Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto by Legacy Russell (review)

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a blending of online and offline worlds, a space where many millennials and generations onward feel at home. A common viewpoint regarding online versus offline space considers our identities within each as separate. However, Legacy Russell's Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto declares that our online self is directly tied to our offline self, and this looping connection is something we can analyze and harness to expand conversations surrounding our understanding of the body. In a 2013 piece for The Society Pages, Russell coined the term "Glitch Feminism," describing it as a "feminism for a digital age." Whereas cyberfeminism asks if we can transcend our bodies through cyberspace, Russell claims that we can transcend our bodies entirely by returning to the abstraction from which we were born. Russell, who is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, also emphasizes the value of digital art and its capacity for allowing escape from gendered and racialized body expectations by incorporating images from queer artists and artists of color. Glitch Feminism's argument finds connection with Sara Ahmed's explanation of becoming a feminist in Living a Feminist Life: "Feminism might pick up (or hopefully pick us up) from the experiences that leave us vulnerable and exposed. [It is] how we survive the consequences of what we come up against by offering new ways of understanding what we come up against" (22). "Glitch-becoming" gives marginalized communities new ways to understand themselves and the world through their online explorations, as well as the tools to persist in a society that was not made for us.

Russell considers the term IRL—or "In Real Life"—to be a misunderstanding which suggests that online activity lacks authenticity, detached from a user's "real," offline identity. Instead, she advocates for the use of AFK—or "Away From Keyboard"—because it signifies a self that continues when a user disconnects from the digital. The use of AFK also "works toward undermining the fetishization of 'real life'" and can show us how our online actions and explorations can deepen our AFK existence (43). In her introduction to the book, Russell lays out how her childhood in a gentrifying New York and her experience with "middle school heteronormativity" shaped her relationship to the Internet, a liberatory space where she could be anyone. Her "queer Black body" was only offered limited definitions in the mainstream: "What the world AFK offered was not enough. I wanted—demanded—more" (6). Russell chose to disrupt the mainstream AFK, to imagine other possible futures, and by doing so, she began to understand the glitch.

According to Russell, "A glitch is an error, mistake, a failure to function . . . an indicator of something having gone wrong" (7). She asserts that to disrupt the binary and trouble heteronormative notions of the body, we need to seize our failure to function and embrace our multiplicity, or our body's "right to range" (21). When, through surveillance and image-capturing digital technologies, a body is not read as normative, it becomes more vulnerable. However, when a body "contains multitudes," it becomes "every-body and no-body simultaneously," harnessing the glitch to both attract and divert (137). It is in this digital diaspora, Russell explains, where bodies have no single destination, but rather they fluidly occupy many places all at once.

A particularly fascinating element in Russell's text plays on the idea of "ghosting." Ghosting is a tactic often used to avoid commitments—like significant others or places of employment—by simply choosing to cease communication; one separates themselves digitally to solidify a separation AFK. By viewing the online world as detached from the AFK world, the person enacting the ghosting rejects responsibility for their behavior. They take deliberate action online and live passively AFK. Russell writes, "If to be recognized as a body that deserves to live we must perform a certain self—look a certain way, live a certain way, care for one another in...