‘Glitch Feminism’ in Praxis? Legacy Russell, Sheena Patel and the algorithm
Amelia Anthony
DIGITAL DUALISM is dead—and has been, at least, since Nathan Jurgenson coined the term in 2011 to describe the fallacy of viewing the digital world as any less “real” than the material world. As we all well know, online activity is just as consequential as offline matter. We exist in a hybrid world, with information, affect, and everything else easily traversing the mutable boundary between the virtual and what is “AFK” (away-from-keyboard, the term preferred to the too-digital-dualist “IRL”).
Two contemporary works—Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminist Manifesto and Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan—take the inextricability of the digital and material worlds as a point of departure. Russel’s theory emerged in 2020 as the latest iteration in cyberfeminist thought. Patel’s debut novel arrived in 2022 as a critique of power structures on and off-line. Yet when read together, these works reveal different conclusions about the potential of feminist liberation on the digital sphere. Glitch feminism’s techno-utopic dreams feel outdated in the few years since its conception—the algorithm in all its scope and strength consumes and assimilates the liberatory potential of the “glitch.” Meanwhile, Patel’s novel depicts the consequences of taking algorithmic logic to the extreme—something online engagement these days actively encourages and reinforces.
I’m a Fan, fittingly, opens with cyberstalking. In a pattern of actions that soon become familiar, the unnamed narrator obsessively refreshes the Instagram of “the woman I am obsessed with.” The main love object—“the man I want to be with”—is a rich and successful artist cheating on his wife with several women, including the narrator and “the woman I am obsessed with.” The far-from-lovable narrator is also cheating on her doting, live-in boyfriend. While this love polygon is complicated, the draw “the man I want to be with”’ has upon the narrator is extremely familiar. He is sexy, charming, famous—“the proximity to power is too much to resist” (26)—and, of course, extremely unavailable.
Early on, the narrator acknowledges that she knows exactly what she is getting herself into. She can’t compete with the longstanding, more passionate romance that exists between “the man I want to be with” and “the woman I am obsessed with.” Moreover, unlike her, they both are members of the cultural elite. They possess class and racial privilege and concomitant access to spaces out of reach to the narrator, who is a second-generation immigrant to London and a precarious freelance worker.
Dually subordinated by unrequited love and unpossessed privilege, the narrator is forever destined to be “a fan”; the titular metaphor deftly compresses both forms of power the other characters have over her into a single critique. Assuming her place within this hierarchy, the narrator exhibits what could be considered “fan behavior.” Chasing the attention of “the man I want to be with,” she debases herself countless times in pursuit of what is succinctly described in a chapter title, quoting the meme of late, as “dick from someone who doesn’t care if you live or die.” Cyberstalking of the “the woman I am obsessed with” suspends the narrator in masochistic voyeurism, mediated by screens and artifice: “I can absolutely feel as if it were in my own body, how excruciatingly happy [she] is from her Instagram.” The narrator’s painful and prolonged attachments to the two other characters does little but bring her further alienation and pain. And with her repeated engagement comes her complicity.
“The man I want to be with” is infuriatingly unavailable to meet AFK. He often cancels, makes excuses, or draws boundaries to limit their contact, including unilaterally banning sex. Her obsessive desire for him, then, manifests digitally: “I am isolated, constantly checking my phone, moving from his Instagram to hers many times a minute.” The online world of the narrator is rendered just as “real” as the material world and the boundary separating them is often nonexistent. On-screen affect and logic transmute from the digital to the material; at several points, she slips from cyberstalking to actual stalking. In conversation with my contemporary fiction class at UCL, Patel said that she wanted to create a sense that the entire novel could have happened without the narrator leaving her bedroom. In this way, I’m a Fan joins the likes the emerging canon of hyper-online fiction, alongside Fake Accounts (Lauren Oyler, 2021), Taipei (Tao Lin, 2013), Surveys (Natasha Stagg, 2016), and No One Is Talking About This (Patricia Lockwood, 2021).
Even reading I’m a Fan is like scrolling: the short, snappy chapters whiz by for those with short attention spans and demand attention through the immediacy of the present tense. The narrative is nonlinear, often interrupted by rants and non-sequiturs. Several chapter titles recall memes of late, part of a pastiche of contemporary cultural references that sit alongside each other soon to be outdated. Momentum throughout is fueled by the narrator’s singular voice. Often angry, occasionally tender, she is always hungry for more: attention, sex, love, money, power, recognition, or validation. The narrator understandably dreams of “gamifying” the system—winning over “the man I want to be with” and harnessing his social status because “being with him is a hack for what I have to slog to achieve myself.” But she was never supposed to win this game. Downward she falls. Her boyfriend finds out about the affair and she has to move back in with her parents. She drifts apart from her friends. She never gets close to the type of validation she seeks from obsessing over “the woman I am obsessed with” or “the man I want to be with.”
Eventually the narrative settles in more-or-less the same place it began, with the narrator and “the man I want to be with” starting to send each other risqué emails once again. This circular ending is the only possible one, since the narrator hasn’t broken with the “logic” of fandom. Her complicit, repeated engagement with the hierarchical structures of obsessive love and social power only strengthened their hold upon her. While “the man I want to be with” and “the woman I am obsessed with” move onwards and upwards, the narrator can only sink lower.
Born in a blog post in The Society Pages (2012) and then refined in Rhizome (2013), Legacy Russell’s “glitch feminism” got its latest update in 2020. The tool for feminist liberation Russell offers is the “glitch,” the digital, machinic error as “a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of non performance.” Through glitching, the body can be liberated from the rigid confines of gender and returned to “abstraction.”
Glitch feminism is proudly “anti-body.” Russell argues that it is the body that confines the multidimensional, abstract self into a fixed, singular corporeality. Gender is “the weapon” that “circumscribes the body, ‘protects’ it from becoming limitless, from claiming the infinite vast, from realizing its true potential.” The body that “pushes back at the application of pronouns, or remains indecipherable within binary assignment” is one fundamental example of the “glitch.”
Departing the confines of the corporeal, glitch feminism manifests digitally. It is online that “we make new worlds and dare to modify our own” (10). The body of Glitch Feminism Manifesto offers several examples of glitch feminism in praxis, specifically in the work of several contemporary artists. A constellation of “glitches” from E. Jane to American Artist showcases diverse and inventive interventions at the intersection of art and technology. Russell’s analysis—save a shockingly naïve reading of the CGI “influencer” LilMiquela as anything but a marketing tool co-opting marginalized identities—highlights the potential of creative practice, especially performance, as a liberatory means to reach beyond the constraints of the gendered and racialized body.
Yet reading about these successful individual artists leaves one wondering about the feasibility of collective liberation in the digital sphere. Patel’s narrator, for one, is doubtful. For her writing to gain success online, as a second-generation immigrant and queer woman of color, she must “masticate [her] life, spit it out and decorate it on the page.” Even though she is arguably a “glitched” person, she sees no potential for worldmaking or authenticity online. Digital spaces are poisoned by marketable neoliberal identity politics—and these “algorithmic” logics slip from online to offline.
Our human imaginations are funneled to think along the narrow lines of the algorithm—if you liked that you’ll love this. The narratives open to us are the ones based on our identities as it is these stories that are market and social media approved… For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness—by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase?
Those who manage to achieve individual success within digital institutions do so by regurgitating the same palatable, marketable, and digestible narratives. And this process will always leave others behind: “we are saddened by the knowledge that nothing really collectively changes but reassured by the thought that it did for me on an individual level.”
Glitch Feminist Manifesto has an autobiographical genesis; it opens with a nostalgic rendering of Internet 1.0. Online, a young, Black, femme, and queer person like Russell was able to don different identities in late-night chat rooms and freely experiment with blossoming versions of herself. The digital sphere was untouched by the hardships AFK, where rampant heteronormativity in school and rapid gentrification of the East Village threatened the emergence of the self who had been found online. Glitch feminism pays tribute to this process as“a mediation of desire for all those bodies like mine who continue to come of age at night on the Internet.”
In an earlier iteration of glitch feminism, Russell wrote, “we have an opportunity to resist repeating history, making the same mistakes, and falling victim to plugging in the same archaic modes of heteronormativity that have come to dominate world systems beyond our screens.” It was 2013: recent on/offline political activity, including Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, was actively shifting cultural paradigms. The liberatory “world-making” potential of the digital sphere may have felt within reach. Back then, Russell wrote of the digital sphere as a blank slate upon which “new constructions of identity, politic, sociality, and potentiality” could be created.
Yet this techno-utopic proclamation has been completely softed in the 2020 Glitch Feminism Manifesto; Russell instead ends up making concessions, anxious to acknowledge that digital spheres are tainted with the same poisonous hierarchies that proliferate life 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.
The algorithm is indeed the enemy of the glitch. Cannibalizing content for capital, it threatens to subsume and assimilate any presence of otherness. As the algorithm rapidly increases in scope and power, the techno-utopic heights of glitch feminism dim. The digital spaces most familiar to those neither software engineers nor Internet artists—social media—are exactly where the algorithm reigns. Thus, the layperson’s potential to “glitch” in praxis feels slim, and increasingly diminishing.
Russell identifies the “paradox of using [social media] platforms that grossly co-opt, sensationalize, and capitalize on POC, 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).” Rightly recalling Audre Lorde’s maxim “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house,” just to negate it, Russell offers the paltry strategy of “strategic occupation” of social media. Glitch feminism, here, seems awfully complicit in its compromise with big tech. Social media algorithms are oriented in the opposite direction from intersectional feminist liberation: TikTok’s encourages homophobia and transphobia, Twitter’s promotes right-wing content, and Instagram suppresses online Palestinian voices.
On an ideological level, glitch feminism aims to depart from the fixity of binary identity. Online, though, the algorithm is busy assigning, and confining, people to exactly those fixed identities. It works to simplify complexity and assimilate difference into easily digestible and marketable forms. A hierarchy is established based on profitability.At one point, the narrator of I’m a Fan comments on the tendency of “the woman I am obsessed with” to take photos of plants, art, and other things and “explain them” on Instagram to her white fans—who “enjoy her cutting up and labeling the world as she finds it.” Recognizable to anyone who follows an influencer, the narrator sees a racialized ideology behind these types of stories. That is, this behavior is “whiteness” insofar as it “is everywhere, pervasive, its assumption that it needs to be there to sanitize, to give order by creating a hierarchy.” Moreover, she writes, “whiteness believes that all things need an organizing principle and by chance it has the answer—the principle it offers is itself.” By a different name, an organizing principle is embedded in nearly all of our accessible digital platforms: the algorithm.
Russel’s glitch feminist dreams, already dimmed by the time the manifesto came out, seem out of reach to the everyday person. The digital institutions most familiar to us are controlled by the algorithm. Spaces not yet corrupted by it—spaces with room to “glitch” —might be found AFK.
A short, easy-to-miss chapter called “tender” in I’m a Fan offers a glimpse at what feels like the narrator’s “real life.” Specifically implicated and celebrated is the body. Singing, dancing, cooking, eating, touching, and cuddling are all sources of intimacy, connection, and joy for the narrator. Unlike her shadowy, anonymous, and isolated presence as a “fan,” she is part of a caring couple and larger community: “When the world is cruel to [our friends], they stay for days in our spare room and we feed them back to health.” These “tender” interactions are a stark contrast from the rejection and isolation she faces from fixating on “the man I want to be with,” “the woman I am obsessed with,” and the hierarchical power structures they represent and uphold.
Up against the algorithm’s leviathan power, recuperating the places far, far away from the keyboard might be the only option for liberation.
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