Sexual violence is a structural problem and not an abuse of power by perverse men. To say that it is a structural problem means that women are set up to be sexually abused by the economic conditions in which the majority of us are forced to live. Clearly, if women earned higher wages, if waitresses did not depend on tips to pay the rent, if film directors and producers couldn’t decide the future of young women who turn to them for jobs, if we could leave abusive relationships or jobs in which we are sexually harassed—then we would see a change.
Through the persecution of ʻwitchesʼ, women wishing to control their reproductive capacity were denounced as enemies of children and, in different ways, subjected to a demonization that has continued into the present.
Like every other form of reproduction, procreation too has a clear class character and is racialized. Relatively few women worldwide can today decide whether to have children and the conditions in which to have them.
On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiotity; on the other hand, woman have been made to suffer and to feel both contemtible and suspect by virtue of its existence.
Why is it that cookbooks, a genre associated with women, need not follow the same citation conventions as other forms of scholarship? And, more broadly, why are recipes not considered a form of scholarship?
Women, in capitalist development, have suffered a double process of mechanization. Besides being subjected to the discipline of work, paid and unpaid, in plantations, factories, and homes, they have been expropriated from their bodies and turned into sexual objects and breeding machines.
Of course, woman so empowered are dangerous
There can be violence at stake in being recognizable as women; there can be violence at stake in not being recognizable as women.
No one is born a woman; it as an assignment […] that can shape us; make us; and break us.
In other words, ʻ womanʼ is not a static, monolithic term but one that has simultaneously different, even opposite and always changing significations. It is not just a performance, an embodiment of institutional norms, but also a contested terrain, constantly being fought over and redefined.
Children can also be a source of joy, often the only wealth a woman has. Our task, then, is not to tell women that they should not have children, but to make sure that women can decide whether to have them and to ensure that mothering is not costing us our lives.
Describing a gender category like ʻwomanʼ as the product of performance means rejecting centuries of restrictions and rules imposed on us by appeal to a mythical female nature.
My mother, the first witch I ever knew, she who created me, she whose voice was the first thing I heard. She, the first person who could bind me, but also the first person who could heal and release me, could even protect me with her words.
I think, in 2020, it is time to leave gender and the sex divide behind us. This does not mean that the inequality between humans is solved—but by considering all bodies to be fluid and interconnected we might open up a more peaceful and contextualised way of achieving equality for all life in this world.
I think of feminist action as like ripples in water, a small wave, possibly created by agitation from weather; here, there, each movement making another possible, another ripple, outward, reaching.
Given the various interconnected and anthropogenically exacerbated water crises that our planet currently faces—from drought and freshwater shortage to wild weather, floods, and chronic contamination—this meaningful mattering of our bodies is also an urgent question of worldly survival. In this book I reimagine embodiment from the perspective of our bodies’ wet constitution, as inseparable from these pressing ecological questions.
“Water in other words, flows through and across difference. (…) Water flows between, as both: a new hydro-logic.”
A voice acts as a powerful tool—an extension of my body that reaches even those who cannot see me. A voice adds another layer to words that are spoken.
Theory can do more the closer it gets to the skin.
Within the academy, the word theory has a lot of capital. Some work becomes theory because it refers to other work that is known as theory. A citational chain is created around theory: you become a theorist by citing other theorist that cite other theorist.
What is this thing called feminist theory? We might at first assume that feminist theory is what feminists working within the academy generate. I want to suggest that feminist theory is something we do at home.
Every word I write is an extension of the rebellion in my body, a piece of shed skin, a liminal space, an ecotone between me and the other.
Skin, I will argue with reference to certain nineteenth-century monsters, becomes a kind of metonym for the human; and its color, its pallor, its shape mean everything within a semiotic of monstrosity. Skin might be too tight (Frankenstein’s creature), too dark (Hyde), too pale (Dracula), too superficial (Dorian Gray’s canvas), too loose (Leatherface), or too sexed (Buffalo Bill). Skin houses the body and it is figured in Gothic as the ultimate boundary, the material that divides the inside from the outside.
The ruler had holes in it: intended as different shapes you could trace onto paper; squares, circles, triangles. Those shapes became shapes left on my own skin; squares, circles, triangles. I remember that feeling of being marked by violence in the very shapes of my childhood. This history enacted on our bodies is one that we carry with us.
We must learn to be at home in the quivering tension of the in- between. No other home is available. In-between nature and culture, in-between biology and philosophy, in-between the human and everything we ram ourselves up against, everything we desperately shield ourselves from, everything we throw ourselves into, wrecked and recklessly, watching, amazed, as our skins become thinner.
Slowly but surely the outside becomes the inside and the hide no longer conceals or contains, it offers itself up as text, as body, as monster. The Gothic text, whether novel or film, plays out an elaborate skin show.
Sex is ʻresourcedʼ for its representation as gender, which ʻweʼ can control. It has seemed all but impossible to avoid the trap of an appropriationist logic of domination built into the nature/culture opposition and its generative lineage, including the sex/gender distinction
Feminist ideas are what we come up with to make sense of what persists.
I realise that I am trying to make sense. Should I try to un-make sense, to apply my own counter-method, to take myself out of the grid that I’m criticising? As an act of rebellion? I feel rebellious today.
People may shout, but what of order?! shall we allow chaos into museums, schools, politics?! how will art be sold?! how will artists make a living?! [...] only we will be meeting together and laughing with one another because that is one joy way to tear this shit down. and somewhere in the cacophonic mess of this echoing back and forth there is the senselessness we crave like air for someone in the hold where the air has grown too thin.
I toyed with power dynamics, exchanging with other face-less strangers, empowered via creating new selves, slipping in and out of digital skins, celebrating in the new rituals of cybersex.
To seize ʻmultiple selvesʼ is, therefore, an inherently feminist act: multiplicity is a liberty.
To exist within a binary system one must assume that ourselves are unchangeable, that how we are read in the world must be chosen for us, rather than for us to define—and choose—for ourselves.
It is also true that women stay in abusive situations, even if they are not economically dependent, because we are used to valuing our selves depending on whether we please men. We have not been trained to value ourselves on the basis of what we do, of our accomplishments.
I learned how to construct and perform my gendered self from the punk kids I met on my stoop, from the drag queens.
We become bodies by recognizing ourselves and, in looking outward, by recognizing aspects of our self in others.
Capitalism [...] has defined women as bodies—that is, as beings dominated by their biology, insofar as it has appropriated our reproductive capacity and put it at the service of the reproduction of the workforce and the labor market.
[Jenny] Brown suggests that women should consciously take advantage of this concern to bargain better conditions ofliving and work. In other words, she suggests that we use our capacity to reproduce as a tool of political power.
But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the supression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of woman; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we art now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.
How has patriarchal gendered stereotypes of men as rational/objective and women as emotional/sentimental shaped perceptions of knowledge production?
Knowledge has also been treated like a territory to be conquered, like a field waiting to be mastered, and these are not the only ways thinking functions and they can be untaught unlearned undone. opening to ʻcrazyʼ saying yes to it is one way. it is in the frothing babble of our togetherness that something else emerges, a getting with and moving towards, a nearing. and ʻI donʼt get itʼ and ʻI grasp your meaning‘ and ʻI got itʼ and ʻyou get meʼ are all knowledge metaphors that have to do with holding, grasping, possessing––as if knowledge were a thing i could hold and own, sell and trade.
If anybody here that has been defined by the medical regime as having a uterus and therefore has been a center of biopolitical reproduction. I mean thatʼs why you are defined I mean you are defined as a sperm producers or uterus. If you anybody here that is still wants to identify as biopolitical factory and so is like yeah I do identify, come, the power of reproduction of life come to me and I do not identify as a biopolitical factory of any sort so thats why I do also de-identify I donʼt know how you say in englisch with this assignation that has been given to me of becoma a reproductive uterus, meaning being female.
In the hands of government and other institutions, ʻidentity politicsʼ is a problem because it separates us into different groups, each with a set of rights— women’s rights, gay rights, indigenous peoples’ rights, trans rights—without acknowledging what stands in the way of our being treated with justice. We must be critical of any concept of identity that is not historical and transformative, that does not allow us to see our different and common forms of exploitation. But we need to address differently social identities that are rooted in particular forms of exploitation and are reshaped by a history of struggle still continuing in our time, for tracing our identities back to a history of exploitation and struggle allows us to find a common ground and collectively shape a more equitable vision of the future.
We have to bring feminist theory home because feminist theory has been too quickly understood as something that we do when we are away from home (as if feminist theory is what you learn when you go to school).
Within glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.
Glitch feminism demands an occupation of the digital as a means of worldbuilding.
Glitch feminism urges us to consider the in-between as a core component of survival—neither masculine nor feminine, neither male nor female, but a spectrum across which we may be empowered to choose and define ourselves for ourselves.
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 ʻin glitchʼ finds its genesis.
To glitch is to embrace malfunction, and to embrace malfunction.
Glitch is also about claiming our right to complexity, to range, within and beyond the proverbial margins.
A glitch is an error, a mistake, a failure to function.
This nonperformance is a glitch. This glitch is a form of refusal.
Alone and together, ʻfemaleʼ, ʻqueer,ʼ ʻBlackʼ as a survival strategy demand the creation of their individual machinery, that innovates, builds, resists. With physical movement often restricted, female-identifying people, queer people, Black people invent ways to create space through rupture. Here, in that disruption, with our collective congregation at that trippy and tripwired crossroad of gender, race, and sexuality, one finds the power of the glitch.
The construct of gender binary is, and has always been, precarious. Aggressively contingent, it is an immaterial invention that in its toxic virality has infected our social and cultural narratives.
None of us, whatever gender we perform, or which sex we are born with, chose or created the system we live in.
Gender has been used as a weapon against its own populace.
No feminism worthy of its name would use the sexist idea ʻ women born womenʼ to create the edges of feminist community, to render trans women into ʻnot womenʼ, or ʻnot born womenʼ, or into men.
To be a feminist at work is or should be about how we challenge ordinary and everyday sexism, including academic sexism. This is not optional: it is what makes feminism feminist. A feminist project is to find ways in which women can exist in relation to women; how women can be in relation to each other. It is a project because we are not there yet.
In a world in which human is still defined as man, we have to fight for women and as women. And to do that we also need to challenge the instrumentalization of feminism. Even though feminism can be used as a tool that can help us make sense of the world by sharpening the edges of our critique, it is not something we can put down. feminism goes wherever we go.
If we think of the second-wave feminist motto “the personal is political,” we can think of feminism as happening in the very places that have historically been bracketed as not political: in domestic arrangements, at home, every room of the house can become a feminist room, in who does what where, as well as on the street, in parliament, at the university. Feminism is wherever feminism needs to be. Feminism needs to be everywhere.
Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.
Yet, along this line of inquiry, glitch feminism remains a mediation of desire for all those bodies like mine who continue to come of age at night on the Internet. The glitch acknowledges that gendered bodies are far from absolute but rather an imaginary, [...] The glitch is an activist prayer, a call to action, as we work toward fantastic failure, breaking free of an understanding of gender as something stationary.
Living a feminist life does not mean adopting a set of ideals or norms of conduct, although it might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist world); how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls.
The figure of the feminist policer is exercised because she is useful; hearing feminists as police is a way of not hearing feminism.
The word feminism can set the stage on fire.
Bell Hooks’s definition of feminism as “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and sexual oppression” From this definition, we learn so much. feminism is necessary because of what has not ended: sexism, sexual exploitation, and sexual oppression.
A feminist movement depends on our ability to keep insisting on something: the ongoing existence of the very things we wish to bring to an end.
No wonder feminism causes fear; together, we are dangerous.
It might be assumed that feminism is what the West gives to the East. That assumption is a traveling assumption, one that tells a feminist story in a certain way, a story that is much repeated; a history of how feminism acquired utility as an imperial gift. That is not my story. We need to tell other feminist stories. feminism traveled to me, growing up in the West, from the East.
What would a feminist movement be like that placed not just the struggle against racism, but also against the institutions that generate it, at the top of its agenda as an intolerable social crime?
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic.
The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.
Beyond, the superficial, the considered phrase “It feels right to me” acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding. And understanding is a handmaiden which can only wait upon, or clarify that knowledge, deeply born.
When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences.
When we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and a alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individualʼs.
I want to write about how fluidity and emotionality are feminist countermethods to the rational grid.
As long as you can control your emotions and use them for your benefit, and as they are happening in an appropriate space, they are allowed.
Values such as reason, rationality, and order are deeply rooted in Eurocentric culture, having been developed as ideals during the fairly masculine dominated age of the Enlightenment: There is traditionally no room for uncontrolled emotional forces in a man’s world.
If feminism allows us to redirect our emotions toward different objects, our emotions can become their objects. We are dismissed as emotional. It is enough to make you emotional.
I see the typefaces I make as my visual voice: as an ecotone between the biotope that I am and the biotopes around me. An extension of my body, my skin stretching out and dripping into another body.
By venturing to feminism’s ecotones, and leaping in, we can discover that feminism dives far deeper than human sexual difference, and outswims any attempts to limit it thus.
An ecotone is also a zone of fecundity, creativity, transformation; of becoming, assembling, multiplying; of diverging, differentiating, relinquishing. “[...] spaces where two complex systems meet, embrace, clash, and transform one another.”
Honestly I mean if they got the guys that are here, the ones that identify as male and watch pornography if they are really happy with the pornography that they see I mean too bad for them it is total garbage what they are looking at right now. So I mean you are being contructed your sexuality your desire your pleasure is being contructed trough that so for me itʼs not so much question of all poor woman they are beeing objectified it is also that masculine desire is contructed in such a garbage.
Citation was a celebration, then; there was solidarity in citation. There was feminist community. Citation was about belonging and gratitude.
Citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings. My citation policy has affected the kind of house I have built.
Perhaps citations are feminist straw: lighter materials that, when put together, still create a shelter but a shelter that leaves you more vulnerable.
And since citation and name association provide the most valuable scholarly currency, this has material consequences: limiting who has access to the seats of institutional power.
Citations concatenate academic discourse; therefore, students can use citations to connect scholars and thereby build a more equitable, celebratory, and inclusive academic community. The activity ideally concludes with a review and rethinking.
Emotions are associated with women, who are represented as ʻcloser’ to nature, ruled by appetite, and less able to transcend the body through thought, will and judgement.
As such, we are not on the one hand embodied (with all of the cultural and metaphysical investments of this concept) while on the other hand primarily comprising water (with all of the attendant biological, chemical, and ecological implications). We are both of these things, inextricably and at once—made mostly of wet matter, but also aswim in the discursive flocculations of embodiment as an idea.
If we are all bodies of water, than we are differentiated not so much by the ʻwhat’ as by the ʻhow’.
It is the fragile outline of my body, my semipermeable home, sometimes irritated when I am irritated, then I use expensive moisturiser from the pharmacy.
Within the nineteenth-century Gothic, authors mixed and matched a wide variety of signifiers of difference to fabricate the deviant body—Dracula, Jekyll/Hyde, and even Frankenstein’s monster before them are lumpen bodies, bodies pieced together out of the fabric of race, dass, gender, and sexuality.
Through the application of the glitch, we ghost on the gendered body and accelerate toward its end. The infinite possibilities presented as a consequence of this allows for our exploration: we can dis-identify and by dis-identify, we can make up our own rules in wrestling with the problem of the body.
The glitch challenges us to consider how we can ʻpenetrate... break... puncture... tear’ the material of the institution, and, by extension, the institution of the body. Thus, hacking the ʻcode’ of gender, making binaries blurry, becomes our core objective, a revolutionary catalyst. glitched bodies—those that do not align with the canon of white cis gender heteronormativity—pose a threat to social order. Range-full and vast, they cannot be programmed.
On the one hand, we have the most extreme forms of biological determinism, with the assumption of the DNA as the deus absconditus (hidden god) presumably determining, behind our backs, our physiological and psychological life. On the other, we have (feminist, trans) theories encouraging us to discard all ʻbiological’ factors in favor of performative or textual representations of the body and to embrace, as constitutive of our being, our growing assimilation with the world of machines.
In no place has the attempt to reduce women’s bodies to machines been more systematic, brutal and normalized than in slavery. While exposed to constant sexual assaults and the searing pain of seeing their children sold as slaves, after England banned the slave trade in 1807, enslaved women in the US were forced to procreate to fuel a breeding industry with its center in Virginia.
“There are tides in the body,” writes Virginia Woolf. We ebb and flow across time and space—body, to body, to body, to body.
The idea of ʻbody’ carries this weapon: gender circumscribes the body, ʻprotects’ it from becoming limitless, from claiming the infinite vast, from realizing its true potential.
We use ʻbody’ 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.
One is not born, but rather becomes, a body.
Othered bodies are rendered invisible because they cannot be read by a normative mainstream and therefore cannot be categorized.
But it was not until the 1970s that feminists began to organize, openly and on a mass level, to fight under the banner of ʻbody politics’ for control over our sexuality and for the right to decide whether to procreate. body politics expressed the realization that our most intimate, presumably ʻprivate’ experiences are in reality highly political matters of great of concern to the nation-state, as demonstrated by the extensive legislation that governments have historically adopted to regulate them. body politics also recognized that our capacity to produce new lives has subjected us to forms of exploitation far more extensive, invasive, and degrading than those that men have suffered, and more difficult to resist.
Births are not felt. Children are pulled out of sensationless bodies. Giving birth is reduced to a mechanical process.
Bodies and worlds are drifting apart.
Besides the danger of medical speculation and malpractice, there is the further concern that body remakes remain individual solutions and add to the process of social stratification and exclusion, as the ʻcare of the body’ requires more money, time, and access to services and resources than the majority can afford, particularly when surgeries are involved.
For what it finds, in going beyond the periphery of the skin, is [ ...] a magical continuity with the other living organisms that populate the earth: the bodies of humans and the not-humans, the trees, the rivers, the sea, the stars. This is the image of a body that reunites what capitalism has divided, a body no longer constituted as a Leibnizian monad, without windows and without doors, but moving instead in harmony with cosmos, in aworldwhere diversity is a wealth for all and a ground of commoning rather than a source of divisions and antagonisms.
It was clear to me, as I stood at a volatile intersection, that the binary was some kind of fiction.
If naming sexism is understood as policing behavior, then we will be feminist police.
When she (almost) snaps, they say, “Don’t let it get under your skin.” One man asks, “Where’s your sense of humor?”
I am aware that not all feminists are at home in the academy, and that the academic language of feminist theory can be alienating. In this book, I do use academic language. I am working at home, so academic language is one of my tools. But I also aim to keep my words as close to the world as I can, by trying to show how feminist theory is what we do when we live our lives in a feminist way.
Glitch feminism dissents, pushes back against capitalism.
For what it finds, in going beyond the periphery of the skin, is not a culinary paradise but a magical continuity with the other living organisms that populate the earth: the bodies of humans and the not-humans, the trees, the rivers, the sea, the stars. This is the image of a body that reunites what capitalism has divided, a body no longer constituted as a Leibnizian monad, without windows and without doors, but moving instead in harmony with cosmos, in a world where diversity is a wealth for all and a ground of commoning rather than a source of divisions and antagonisms.
When you say I am a man or I am a woman what you are yasying is like porducing a truth about yourself right thatʼs what you are doing.
Your body’s central organ is your heart. Your personality’s central organ is your voice.
I’m not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is postpornographic, add a molecular prostheses to my low-tech transgender identity composed of dildos, texts, and moving images; [...].
Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, and Norbert Wiener had an intuition about it in the 1950s: the technologies of communication function like an extension of the body. Today, the situation seems a lot more complex—the individual body functions like an extension of global technologies of communication.