Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell

ABOUT GLITCH FEMINISM by Legacy Russell:

In 2013, I coined the term Glitch Feminism and began producing scholarship surrounding this socio-techno construct of gender and sexuality.

First published as an item for The Society Pages, and then later expanded upon in a commission for Rhizome, The Glitch Feminist Manifesto observes:

"In a society that conditions the public to find discomfort or outright fear in the errors and malfunctions of our socio-cultural mechanics—illicitly and implicitly encouraging an ethos of “Don’t rock the boat!”—a “glitch” becomes an apt metonym. Glitch Feminism, however, embraces the causality of “error”, and turns the gloomy implication of glitch on its ear by acknowledging that an error in a social system that has already been disturbed by economic, racial, social, sexual, and cultural stratification and the imperialist wrecking-ball of globalization—processes that continue to enact violence on all bodies—may not, in fact, be an error at all, but rather a much-needed erratum. This glitch is a correction to the “machine”, and, in turn, a positive departure." (L. Russell, The Society Pages, 2013)

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My “Glitch Feminism Manifesto” was first published in 2013, commissioned by digital theorist Nathan Jurgenson for The Society Pages, and then later expanded into a short essay as a commission for new media art publication Rhizome. In the spring of 2013 my paper on Glitch Feminism was accepted into University of Sussex’s “Queer Feminist Social Media Praxis Symposium” and in the fall of 2013 my paper was also accepted into University of Surrey's “Corporeal Computing: A Performative Archaeology of Digital Gesture” conference. Since then Glitch Feminism has gone viral, included in feminist art history syllabi at a variety of institutions such as The Cortauld Institute of Art (UK), The Royal Academy (UK), Evergreen State College (US), University of California at Santa Cruz (US), and beyond. It has also been included in publications and productions put forward by Res. (UK), Kingston University (UK), The Photographers’ Gallery (UK), Stockholm University (SW) University of Massachusetts Amherst (US), Boston University (US), McGill University (Canada), and more. I've lectured and participated in panels speaking on Glitch Feminism at the “Theorizing the Web” conference in New York City (2015); the Institute of Contemporary Art in London (2015); Arcadia University (2017); Castlefield Gallery (2017), London School of Economics (2017), Academy of Fine Arts, Munich (2018), and more.