One of the best discoveries of the year has been Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russel. She introduces this collection of essays as a ‘manifesto’ , and it has certainly sparked something within me.
She conceives the Glitch as a form of refusal :
‘Gender has been used as a weapon against its own populace. The idea of “body” carries the weapon: gender circumscribes the body, “protects” it from becoming limitless, from claiming the infinite vast, from realizing its true potential. (…)We use “body” to give material form to an idea that has no form, an assemblage that is abstract. The concept of a body houses within it social, political and cultural discourses, which change based on where the body is situated and how it is read. (…) A body that pushes back at the application of pronouns, or remains indecipherable within binary assignment , is a body that refuses to perform the score.’[1]
‘The glitch acknowledges that gendered bodies are far from absolute but rather an imaginary, manufactured and commodified for capital.(…) While we continue to navigate towards a more vast and abstract concept of gender , it must be said that at times it really does feel, paradoxically, as if all we have are the bodies we are housed in, gendered or otherwise. Under the sun of capitalism, we truly own little else, and even so, we are often subject to a complicated choreography dictated by the complicated, bureaucratic and rhizomatic systems of institutions.’[2]
‘The glitch ‘creates as homeland for those traversing the complex channels of gender’s diaspora. The glitch is for those selves in the in-between, those who have travelled away from their assigned site of gendered origin’[3].
She also reinterprets Simone De Beauvoir’s famous statement :
‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a body’[4]
One of the chapters I found that most relevant to my project was GLITCH REFUSES. In this chapter , she remarks that having multiple layers, multiple selves , is an exercise of freedom :
‘the construction of a self, creative or otherwise, is complex .E. Jane’s naming and claiming of multiple selves pushes back against flattened raiding of historically othered bodies—intersectional bodies who have travelled restlessly, gloriously, through narrow spaces.’ To seize “multiple selves” is, therefore, an inherently femeninist act : multiplicity is a liberty.’ [5]
She specifically refers back to an excerpt from one of Walt Whitman’s poem Song to Myself :
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
‘Whitman, a white man, was considered radically queer for his time. Within these lines of his, he captures a perfect snapshot of the problem of patriarchy, and of whiteness. Whitman is an agent bound up within a social and cultural status quo, yet that “he contains multitudes” is the exercise of his right to “large”, his capacity to “contradict” himself is his exercise of the right to be blurry, unfixed , abstract. Patriarchy exercises its social dominance by taking up space as a birthright; when patriarchy comes into contact with whiteness , it leaves little room for anything else.(..) it comes as little surprise that under white patriarchy,bodies—selves—that cannot be defined with clarity by the “primary gaze”, are pushed from the centre’[6].
‘Normative cultural institutions and the social construct of taxonomical norms –gender, race, class—within them are quick to marginalise difference. Paradoxically, the very nature of these differences titillate, are labelled as “wild”. Nevertheless, this wildness is permitted as long as it is properly maintained, growing only within its prescribed space.’[7]
I consider these last statement particularly relevant to my project since what I am exploring is the way in which Latin American Gen Z diaspora performs this liberty, through hybrid practices that mix the cultural, the artistic and the political.
[1] Legacy Russel, Glitch Feminism : A Manifesto (Verso, 2020) , p.8
[2] P.9
[3] P.11
[4] P.12
[5] P.18
[6] P.20
[7] P.23