Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism begins with a counterintuitive proposition: a glitch need not be an error awaiting repair; it can be the moment a body refuses a system’s classification. Russell rejects the comforting split between a supposedly authentic offline body and a merely fictional digital self. For Black, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people, screens, avatars, handles, and virtual spaces can be places to test ways of being, change the terms of visibility, and find one another. The digital body is not a cheap substitute for reality. It is one of the places where reality is made and contested.

That claim changes the meaning of “failure.” A form that cannot accommodate a person, an image that will not settle into a familiar category, or a self that moves between names may register as malfunction to a system built for stable identification. Russell asks readers to consider the other side of that encounter: perhaps the body is not broken; perhaps the classification is too narrow. “Glitch” becomes a political method because it makes the limits of supposedly neutral systems perceptible. Institutions demand bodies that are legible, stable, and archivable; platforms turn expression into data; states and markets use categories to distribute recognition, risk, and value. Refusal does not magically abolish these structures, but it interrupts the claim that their rules are natural.

The book makes this argument through artists, not as a gallery of illustrations appended to theory. Russell describes Mark Aguhar’s 2012 work these are the axes as an early point of clarity for thinking about how bodies might celebrate themselves while resisting the gender binary. The work’s place near the book’s beginning matters: the manifesto does not first define a universal body and then add marginalized examples. It starts from a particular artist’s practice and lets that practice unsettle the terms of the discussion. The question is no longer simply whether a body can be represented inside an existing visual order, but who authored that order and what forms of life it cannot recognize.

Shawné Michaelain Holloway’s internet performances sharpen the tension between self-authorship and capture. Russell points to durational performances in which selves are performed over time and recorded through digital platforms. That persistence can create a space for experimentation and presence; it also means the performance circulates through systems that store, frame, and govern what becomes visible. The work therefore resists an easy story in which online identity is either liberating freedom or deceptive masquerade. It asks who controls the conditions of appearance, and whether a person can use a platform without allowing the platform to become the final authority on what that person means.

Sondra Perry’s manipulation of images and exploration of body-machine relations make visibility itself a contested terrain. In Russell’s account, Perry’s digital practice brings race and gender into the same frame: gender is racialized, and race is gendered. This matters because visibility is often treated as an uncomplicated good—as if being seen necessarily means being recognized, protected, or included. But images can also classify, expose, exoticize, and surveil. A transformed image may open room for an otherwise impossible body while revealing that the tools of transformation are entangled with histories of looking and control. Russell’s artist-centered method asks readers to interpret form as political action: not only what an image depicts, but how it makes a body available to a viewer and what the viewer assumes the right to know.

This is also why Russell’s intervention in cyberfeminism is more than a change in its list of representatives. She describes a history in which Black and queer uses of the internet—as gathering places, nightlife, performance, and collective exploration—were insufficiently present in dominant accounts. Correcting that record changes the theory itself: whose practices count as technological knowledge, whose pleasure and experimentation are treated as serious, and who gets to narrate the history of digital life? Her examples resist the familiar image of the internet as a neutral frontier discovered by the already powerful. They show it as a lived, uneven space shaped by exclusion and made otherwise through community practice.

Yet the glitch is not automatically liberatory. Platforms can turn subculture into content and self-exploration into a profile; surveillance, harassment, moderation, and algorithmic bias impose unequal costs. Russell does not present digital space as a utopia outside embodied violence. She keeps online and offline life connected, which also makes a material question unavoidable: who has safe access to experimentation, whose work makes digital life run, and who can withdraw from exposure without losing community or livelihood? The book’s manifesto form is strongest at opening these questions and naming refusal as a creative force; it is less a map of platform governance, labor conditions, or the material supply chains behind technology. That limit does not cancel its argument, but it cautions against treating aesthetic disruption as a substitute for structural change.

Read Glitch Feminism as an invitation to practice a different relation to error, visibility, and bodily possibility—not as a claim that every glitch is resistance or every online space is safe. Russell’s discussion of Aguhar, Holloway, Perry, and other artists is available in her conversation with Momus; the Verso edition page records the book’s publication details. For a complementary account of how technical systems encode racial hierarchy through design and defaults, read Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology. Together, the books make a useful distinction: glitch feminism asks what bodies and identities can do with digital tools, while Benjamin pushes us to ask how those tools are built, who they serve, and what forms of power their apparent neutrality conceals.