Introduction
(GlitchFem, p.13) Yet online I could be whatever I wanted. And so my twelve-year-old self became sixteen, became twenty, became seventy. I aged. I died. Through this storytelling and shapeshifting, I was resurrected. I claimed my range.
Similar to genre hopping? Creating versions of self.
(GlitchFem, p.13) In chatrooms I donned different corpo-realities while the rainbow wheel of death buffered in the ecstatic, dawdling jam of AOL dial-up.
Stylistically it oscillated between tones - sensual, niche, situated (web speak, academic language, poetry)
aside An aside - algospeak as a way of subverting shadow banning leaking into terrestrial conversation? By subverting censorship, finding another kind of censorship (although itās not even that censored, we all know what unalive/pewpew/grape/sa refers to).
(GlitchFem, p.14) Away from the keyboard (or āAFKā),
Instead I searched for opportunities to immerse myself in the potential of refusal. I commenced to push back against the violence of this unconsented visibility, to take control of the eyes on me and how they interpreted my body.
Here, in that disruption, with our collective congregation at that trippy and trip-wired crossroad of gender, race, and sexuality, one finds the power of the glitch
Trippy and trip wired (spooky and unreal, dangerous and psychedelic)
(GlitchFem, p.15) This nonperformance is a glitch. This glitch is a form of refusal.
aside Thereās something about the refusal to perform gender through pronouns that is tickling another area of my brain but Iām not sure what I mean yet. This is mentioned as a form of refusal of gender normativety, and a ābody that refuses to perform the scoreā. Iām thinking of writers who identify as female for instance, but use initials to obscure gender, this is not always a refusal but potentially a entrenching of those norms? I used G George as a pseudonym to appear as more than one person, but also it was assumed I was a man, regardless that George as a surname doesnāt suggest a gender. That was partly conscious. This also occurs in screen names which may or maynot reflect particular characteristics.
āLegibility [becomes] a condition of manipulation: Quote from James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999, p.183.ā Interesting quote #PotentialReading
(GlitchFem, p.17) Thus, the glitch creates a fissure within which new possibilities of being and becoming manifest. This failure to function within the confines of a society that fails us is a pointed and necessary refusal. Glitch feminism dissents, pushes back against capitalism.
Being indefinable, unclassifiable. I find this difficult, because I like topologies in the same way I like organising materials, and objects in containers. I know however there is a freedom in messiness. I just never know where Iāve put anything.
(GlitchFem, p.17) Though the artifice of a simple digital Shangri-Laā a world online where we could all finally be āfreedā from the mores of gender as dreamt of by early cyberfeministsāis now punctured, the Internet still remains a vessel through which a ābecomingā can realize itself. The glitch is a passage through which the body traverses toward liberation, a tear in the fabric of the digital.
(GlitchFem, p.18) This book is for those who are en route to becoming their avatars, those who continue to play, experiment, and build via the Internet as a means of strengthening the loop between online and AFK
I feel like I want to be this but Iām not. I consume a lot online, but I donāt act a lot online. Iām very careful about commenting, posting in some ways, and Iāve never been part of an online community. Maybe thatās fine. Actually, maybe I am doing this, but itās more about observing communities that reflect my gender expression, sexuality and interests, even if Iām not actively contributing content as in posts. If I were, would I want it to be the same version of me that works in academia. Do I want those things to be cohesive - itās always made me uncomfortable when it is in some ways. I like being known but hate being perceived. (I need to get over myself).
(GlitchFem, p.18) errata = an error in printing or writing.
01 - Glitch refuses
E. Janeās naming and claiming of āmultiple selvesā pushes back against a flattened reading of historically othered bodiesāintersectional bodies who have traveled restlessly, gloriously, through narrow spaces. These are the selves that, as writer and activist Audre Lorde wrote in her 1978 poem āA Litany for Survival,ā ālive at the shorelineā and āwere never meant to survive.
āalter-egoā avatar Mhysa.
Avatar v alter-ego. What is it to be more than one thing, one version of working - can I do this under one name? In this came as an alter ego then an extension of self.
I keep knocking up against the idea of continually thinking of self here - who gives a shit about me etc. Maybe the thing is not to be thinking of how this frames me and my practice, but how it can be a method of magpieing bits of selves? I am white, cis female, queer and disabled (but invisibly disabled (and I personally feel weird about claiming that being able bodied despite having the legal status), queer in a straight relationship). I feel like genre swapping/hopping could be considered glitching/dragging but is this appropriate (probably, who says itās not)?
āWe have been cast out of straight timeās rhythm, and we have made worlds in our temporal and spatial configurations.ā 5
PotentialReading Esteban MuƱoz Cruising Utopia
(GlitchFem, p.25) The oblique romance of Internet-as-utopia, against this backdrop reality, should not be dismissed as naĆÆve. Imbuing digital material with fantasy today is not a retro act of mythologizing; it continues as a survival mechanism.
I agree and I donāt. Iām maybe more sceptical but then again, Iām continually living as other people (borrowing tropes) rather than another version of myself. Is that the difference between genre hopping and alter-egoing?