On trans-, glitch, and gender as machinery of failure | Sundén | First Monday

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On trans-, glitch, and gender as machinery of failure by Jenny Sunden

AbstractThis paper develops an understanding of gender as something fundamentally technological, and as such broken. Drawing on the technological undercurrent in current posthumanist feminist theory, it puts into play a vocabulary of malfunctioning, broken, vulnerable technologies, and in particular uses the term ‘glitch’ to account for machinic failures in gender within the digital domain. As an intriguing example of the technologies of (trans)gender, the core example consists of the social media presence and public transition of Isabella Bunny Bennett — a musical performer and a member of the U.S.-based band Steam Powered Giraffe. Drawing on how glitch is understood as an accidental error and a critical potential in aesthetic practices, the article is a contribution to what recently has been coined ‘glitch feminism.’

Contents

Introduction

Posthumanist feminist theory

Technology as a forgotten trope

Glitch, trans-, and the beauty of brokenness

Trans- as malfunction and glitch

Negotiating (trans-) femininity

Glitch feminism

Introduction

Drawing on the technological undercurrent in posthumanist feminist theory, my aim in this paper is to develop an understanding of gender as something fundamentally technological. In thinking gender as technological, I put into play a vocabulary of malfunctioning, broken, vulnerable technologies. If malfunction conceptually locates gender bugs and breakdowns on a general technological level, my purpose is also to make use of the term ‘glitch’ to account for machinic failures in gender within the digital domain. As an intriguing example of technologies of gender in general, and of transgender in particular, I build my argument empirically on the social media presence and public transition of Isabella Bunny Bennett — a musical performer and a member of the steampunk robot band Steam Powered Giraffe.

I take as my point of departure the notion of technologies as always implicating their own failures and breakdowns, the fact that technologies without exception will fail. This idea resonates with Paul Virilio’s theory of the accident, his belief that technology cannot exist independent of its potential for accidents:

Malfunction and failure are not signs of improper production. On the contrary, they indicate the active production of the ‘accidental potential’ in any product. The invention of the ship implies its wreckage, the steam engine and the locomotive discover the derailment. [1]

As holding such accidental potential, every technological invention is simultaneously an invention of technological malfunction. But whereas Virilio’s interest is primarily in developing an aesthetics or an art of the accident within an increasingly accelerated modernity, my own interest is not primarily in notions of speed. Rather than stipulating that technological breakdowns happen more often when technologies move faster, I wish to stay with the idea of technology as something fundamentally broken, imperfect, and flawed, regardless of how quickly it moves.

I want to begin here, at the point of acknowledging the intrinsic brokenness of technologies, and of gender. The perfect machine does not exist, even if technological development largely is driven by a desire to create flawless, seamless, transparent systems and devices. New technologies might solve old problems, but will always bring new problems, new failures, and new ways of breaking down. Similarly, gender as technological is a fragile, instable machinery prone to breakage and breakdowns. Continuous maintenance, upgrades, and reboots might move gender in the direction of an illusion of seamless technological transparency, or even organic wholeness. But it is in the crack, the break, the glitch, that the inner workings of gender reveal themselves. This is not to say that there is a ‘truth’ of gender to be reached through failure. Neither is there a truth to be had about the inside or the depth of (other) machines through their technological vulnerability. Nonetheless, something important may be bared or disclosed, something which we can get a glimpse of in moments of failure, yet never fully grasp or understand. Or as Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin [2] writes about glitches in computer software:

A glitch is a mess that is a moment, as possibility to glance at software’s inner structure, whether it is a mechanism of data compression or HTML code. Although a glitch does not reveal the true functionality of the computer, it shows the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized.

This article explores, precisely, such messy moments in gender, which simultaneously reveal the ghostly conventionality of gender norms and ideals, and the potentiality of a break with such conventions. The argument of the paper is part theoretical exploration, part analytic endeavor, and will be performed in several steps. I begin by situating my argument within the theoretical domain of posthumanist feminist theory, arguing for a reintroduction of technology as a vital element within this field. Secondly, I give brief introductions to the terms trans- and glitch, as well as to Steam Powered Giraffe and the steampunk scene [3]. Thirdly, I turn to the more analytic part of the paper and explore the notion of trans- as malfunction and glitch in Isabella’s portrayal of her transgender girl robot. I then move on to investigate her ways of negotiating (trans)femininity together with her fans. Within this section, in dialogue with research on sound production, I develop the idea of gender ‘high fidelity’ as a contrast to glitch. Finally, I discuss how this article is a contribution to what recently has been coined ‘glitch feminism’ (Russell, 2012).

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Posthumanist feminist theory

A feminist project of thinking gender as something deeply technological pays homage to a range of feminist discussions, but perhaps most clearly finds a home within the current field of posthumanist feminist theory (see, for example, Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Barad, 2003, 2007; Braidotti, 2006, 2013; Wilson, 2004). The idea of the human subject as exceedingly free, autonomous, rational, exceptional (and by default male) has since the Age of Enlightenment been a powerful figure, but one which has also been increasingly challenged and critiqued. In the wake of such critical discussions — ranging from poststructuralism and postcolonial theory to corporeal feminism and queer theory — posthumanist feminist theory is one of the more recent attempts to call into question the unity and the purity of human subjectivity. Departing from how humans are intimately entangled with animals, machines, and the environment, the category of the human is revealed to be both less exceptional and less clearly bounded than previously imagined. To paraphrase Donna Haraway (1991), our bodies and those of others do not end at the skin, which makes us intimately related to a range of nonhuman others, within as well as around us. Posthumanist theory questions the primacy of human subjectivity by tuning in on the relational dimensions in the formation of bodies, subjects, and politics. This becomes particularly clear in the work of the feminist physicist and philosopher Karen Barad [4] and her definition of posthumanist theorizing: “A posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman,’ examining the practices through which these differential boundaries are stabilized and destabilized.”

The nonhuman within posthumanism is an interesting figure, and more often than not a creature of nature. Posthumanist feminist theory is dense with, for example, animals, bacteria, and pollution. Yet nature has long been a troubling site for feminists. Within the field of feminist science studies, which in many ways acts as a forerunner to current posthumanist discussions (Ahmed, 2008), a great deal of effort has been spent on decoupling nature from the natural. This disconnection shows how nature was always something invented, produced, and reproduced, rather than discovered. Nature, then — much like culture — is something that continuously takes shape, and thus can be shaped differently. This fundamental denaturalization of nature also functions as a way of breaking the associative link between woman and nature, or woman as nature. Feminist deconstructions of the nature/culture coupling have had a tendency to involve something of a turn away from nature, to break free from the script according to which science is based on the (masculine) scientific unveiling of (female) nature (Jordanova, 1989).

Within current posthumanist feminist theory, there is instead a tendency to turn away from culture — and toward nature — in an effort to conceptualize nature differently. In this attempt to re-conceptualize nature for feminist purposes, posthumanist theory examines the material specificities of nature in ways that suggest the limits of anthropocentric cultural theory. Nature is understood as agential, as having agency in the sense of being lively, unruly, and disobedient. The matter of nature has the ability to act and provide resistance, to ‘kick back’ in ways that have consequences for how the worlds of human and nonhuman subjects can be approached and understood. An understanding of materiality as active and disobedient also means that such materiality provides certain resistance to processes of cultural imprinting and meaning making. This specific emphasis on the materiality and very force of nature as agential and unruly makes nature the privileged de-stabilizing concept within posthumanist theorizing. This, in turn, has positioned biology in general (and human-animal studies in particular) as a central, if not the most central field of inquiry (Ahmed, 2008; Sullivan, 2012).

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Technology as a forgotten trope

For a posthumanist feminist scholar of media and technology, this privileging of the biological is a curious move. What appears to be an almost forgotten trope within current posthumanist theory is the technological. The reason for the disappearance of the technological in recent posthumanist feminist work is most likely a consequence of an understanding of nature as the domain which holds the most promise for a rewriting of feminist theory. In making the materiality of nature the privileged site of posthumanist feminist politics, technology slips out of sight. This slipping out of sight proceeds as if there was nothing unruly or wild at heart of how technologies work. It is a slipping that simultaneously disregards a body of work that takes seriously questions of nonhuman subjects, materiality, agency, and embodiment in technological domains (Braidotti, 2013; Hayles, 1999; 2005; Suchman, 2007, 2011). The disappearance of the technological in posthumanist theory is all the more curious read against the background of the work of Donna Haraway (1991, 1997, 2007), often pointed out as foundational within posthumanism. What posthumanist feminism takes from her work is her relentless troubling of the nature/culture divide by putting in motion a range of material-semiotic actors. Examples of such actors that populate and inhabit her work are primates, onco-mice, cyborgs, and companion species, all of them sticky and intensely sensical borderland creatures in the intersections of nature, science, and technology.

If human subjects are intimately complicit and co-constituted with a range of nonhuman others, this relationality was never merely a matter of intense intimacy with creatures of nature. It is a relationality which simultaneously, and as forcefully, marks ‘our’ complicitness with technological nonhuman others. It is precisely this de-stabilization of bodily boundaries as well as of the humanness of the human body that makes posthumanist theory important for a study of gender as technological. As a co-constituting force, technology is not something that is simply added to bodies, and hence can be subtracted. Rather, bearing in mind the Cold War logics of Haraway’s cyborg, showing how info/biotechnologies were increasingly entwined with ‘our’ bodies, technology rather provides one of the ways in which bodies become viable at all. Far from being natural, pre-technological, or in any sense pure, bodies are on a fundamental level technologically produced. As such, this article is an argument for a recuperation of technology as an important destabilizing principle and co-constituting force in the making and shaping of bodies, subjects, and posthumanist theory.

Against the backdrop of this reinstatement of the technological in posthumanist theorizing, what does it mean to understand gender as something technological? In arguing for the human body as inextricably technological, this is not a body somehow unmarked by, for example, gender, sexuality, and race. Rather, when the boundaries of the body are destabilized technologically, so are the boundaries of what makes and marks a body as specific. One such boundary, which is at the forefront in this text, is gender.

On the one hand, to think gender as technological emphasizes a way of thinking gender as machinery. Much like how Judith Butler (1993) understands gender as performative, as something that can be understood in terms of a citational apparatus that operates within a heterosexual matrix, gender can be understood as analogous to technology. Technology, here, becomes a metaphor to think with. It facilitates a way of thinking gender as broken, unstable, fragile machinery, as something based on its very brokenness. Judith Halberstam’s (1998) reading of the ‘Turing test’ builds on a similar analogy between the imitative and fundamentally unstable systems of (digital) technologies and gender alike [5]. The first (and often overlooked) test that Turing offered was not to differentiate between human and machine, but between man and woman. Somewhat surprisingly, the introductory man/woman setup is treated as a mere illustration of the elements in the human/machine interface (see Hayles, 1999). Halberstam [6] argues that Turing fails to take into account the apparent relation between gender and machine performances: “both are in fact imitative systems, and the boundaries between female and male [...] are as unclear and as unstable as the boundary between human and machine intelligence.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3921158&forum_id=2#35624666)

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3921158&forum_id=2#35660289)