Legacy Russell > Quotes

“As glitch feminists, this is our politic: we refuse to be hewn to the hegemonic line of a binary body. This calculated failure prompts the violent socio-cultural machine to hiccup, sigh, shudder, buffer. We want a new framework and for this framework, we want new skin. The digital world provides a potential space where this can play out. Through the digital, we make new worlds and dare to modify our own. Through the digital, the body 'in glitch' finds its genesis. Embracing the glitch is therefore a participatory action that challenges the status quo. It creates a homeland for those traversing the complex channels of gender's diaspora. The glitch is for those selves joyfully immersed in the in-between, those who have traveled away from their assigned site of gendered origin. The ongoing presence of the glitch generates a welcome and protected space in which to innovate and experiment. Glitch feminism demands an occupation of the digital as a means of world-building. It allows us to seize the opportunity to generate new ideas and resources for the ongoing (r)evolution of bodies that can inevitably move and shift faster than AFK mores or the societies that produce them under which we are forced to operate offline.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“Skin is as much about what is kept in as what it keeps out. It functions to edit, its existence determining that which will be included or excluded. Skin suggests the protection of a subject and the creation of an 'other' that is forever standing on the outside. As skin wraps, covers, protects, it paradoxically wounds, occupies, and builds worlds.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“Glitched bodies - those that do not align with the canon of white cisgender heteronormativity - pose a threat to social order. Range-full and vast, they cannot be programmed.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“Glitch is something that extends beyond the most literal technological mechanics: it helps us to celebrate failure as a generative force, a new way to take on the world.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“Errors, ever unpredictable, surface the unnamable, point toward a wild unknown. To become an error is to surrender to becoming unknown, unrecognizable, unnamed. New names are created to describe errors, capturing them and pinning down their edges for examination. All this is done in an attempt to keep things up and running; this is the conceit of language, where people assume if they can find a word to describe something, that this is the beginning of controlling it.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“In a dystopic global landscape that makes space for none of us, offers no sanctuary, the sheer at of living - surviving - in the face of a gendered and racialized hegemony becomes uniquely political. We choose to stay alive, against all odds, because our lives matter.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“Gender is a scaled economy: it is a mode of regulation, management, and control.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“Feminism is an institution in its own right. At its root is a legacy of excluding Black women from its foundational moment, a movement that largely made itself exclusive to middle-class white women. At the root of early feminism and feminist advocacy, racial supremacy served white women as much as their male counterparts, with reformist feminism - that is, feminism that operated within the established social order rather than resisting it - appealing as a form of class mobility. This underscores the reality that 'woman' as a gendered assignment that indicates, if nothing else, a right to humanity, has not always been extended to people of color.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“It’s no mistake that established media demean what is in many cases the one platform to which marginalized women have access. You’ve been told to watch us but not engage: the very definition of surveillance,”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“We cannot forget: it was, and continues to be, the presence of blackness that aided in establishing a primary precedent for the notion of intersectionality within feminism.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“In 2015, Google's image-recognition algorithm confused Black users with gorillas. The company's 'immediate action' in response to this was 'to prevent Google Photos from ever labelling any image as a gorilla, chimpanzee, or monkey - even pictures of the primates themselves.' Several years later, Google's 2018 Arts & Culture app with its museum doppelganger feature allowed users to find artwork containing figures and faces that look like them, prompting problematic pairings as the algorithm identified look-alikes based on essentializing ethnic of racialized attributes. For many of us, these 'tools' have done little more than gamify racial bias.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“Feminist 'sisterhood' toward the purpose of increasing white range and amplified social, cultural, economic mobility, is an exercise in service of supremacy - for white women only. This is the ugly side of the movement: one where we acknowledge that while feminism is a challenge to power, not everyone has always been on the same page about who that power is for and how it should be used as a means of progress. Progress for whom? Thus, American abolitionist, women's right activist, and freed slave Sojourner Truth's question 'Ain't I a woman?' asked in 1851 continues to be painfully resonant even today, surfacing the ever-urgent reality of who is brought into the definition of womanhood and, via extension, who is truly recognized as being fully human.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“Historically, feminism was built on this mired foundation, first advocating for parity yet paradoxically not always across all bodies, or without anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-classist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist aims central to its agenda. As a movement, the language of feminism - and, more contemporarily, 'lifestyle feminism' - has in large part been codependent on the existence of gender binary, working for change only within an existing social order. This is what makes the discourse around feminism so complicated and confusing.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto

“When we reject the binary, we claim uselessness as a strategic tool.”
― Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto