Russell, Legacy. "Prayer? Or Practice? Social Shrines and the Ritualized Performance of Reality in Contemporary Art". Academia.edu. Glitch Feminism continues the legacies of cyberfeminism and cyborg feminism by evoking questions of how the complexities of embodiment, so entwined with experiences of gender, queerness, and racialization, extend into digital realms. How can glitch, which at its core is refusal, be reworked as something wonderful in our feminist, queer, and anti-racist utopic envisioning and collective mobilizations? What does it mean to embody glitch, to embody malfunction?

And quite frankly, that made me angry. It made me question, as an art historian, why this story was being told in that way. I think of my peers, the people I have come up with creatively, who are doing incredible work, whom I felt very strongly should be positioned with a greater sense of purpose and clarity across an art historical canon. Why weren’t these conversations being reflected inside of gallery and exhibition spaces and the broader academic discourse? You write in the book, “Glitch is anti-body, resisting the body as a coercive social and cultural architecture.” That brought to mind all the discussions since the pandemic about what it means to be an “essential worker,” that it’s actually a privilege to have access to digital work and not have to show up as a body for work. That’s a question that your manifesto opens up for me: How do you balance embracing the liberating possibilities of cyber identity with the realities that some people’s means of survival make those inaccessible? Travis Alabanza quoted in Lola Olufemi, Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power(Pluto Press, 2020) p. 49.I came across Mark Aguhar’s work in my own late-night surfing of the net, and it’s been a great joy to see it emerge into different places and spaces: some of the work was included in “ Trap Door” at the New Museum and then again in the Brooklyn Museum’s “ Nobody Promised You Tomorrow.” Mark has an enduring presence across conversations about the digital and queering the body in many different spheres. We’ve known for quite some time that the internet is not a utopia. It began as ARPANET. It had its roots in the military. It has always been used for corporate ends. It has never provided us complete freedom from the kind of challenges that afflict us away from our screens. There are very few people who are making this kind of work who aren’t asking these kinds of questions. I’m thinking about American Artist, who’s in the book, and the incredible work that they’ve done about predictive policing.

Victoria Sin, performance at “Glitch @ Night” organized by Legacy Russell as part of “Post – Cyber Feminist International,” 2017, ICA London, courtesy of ICA London, photograph by Mark Blower. As a conceptual framework, glitch reconfigures the typically pejorative way we view failure, brokenness, and the refusal to function. Instead, as Russell convincingly invites us to do, glitch should be welcomed — “the error a passageway” to constructing better worlds. [2] This is because, and here Russell situates glitch feminism in queer-of-colour theory by quoting José Esteban Muñoz: “…this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” [3] Russell draws on Shaadi Devereaux’s analysis of social media as a tool for marginalized women to reach each other, build collective support, and engage in conversation where they might usually be excluded in AFK domains. [4] To break, to dismantle, to fail fantastically in the face of a machine that expects us to keep carrying on as if it isn’t stifling and isn’t programmed to reward some and marginalize others. It is to carve fissures in existing, oppressive systems and its limitations on who we might be and what realms we might inhabit. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).a b Mitter, Siddhartha (8 June 2021). "Legacy Russell Is Named Next Leader of the Kitchen". The New York Times . Retrieved 22 August 2021. In thinking about how this work lives on, my hope is that it can be a strategic tool. The moments that have been most rewarding, in the journey from 2012 to the publication of this book, have been the moments where it has gone out into the world and intersected with people’s lives and living, been made real because it becomes tangible, becoming more than theory for theory’s sake. There are people who have so generously written to me and told me their personal stories about how these texts have been resonant for them, how they’ve opened up new understandings. That, for me, is the most important thing. Russell worked at the online platform Artsy, expanding the company's gallery relations across Europe. [10] She has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and CREATIVE TIME. [ citation needed] She is a contributing editor at BOMB Magazine. [10] Writing edit It’s been quite surreal. The context that the text rose out of was deeply personal. It began with conversations in my community, looking at notions of identity and representation, looking at different utopian demands, thinking about ways where we might make a different type of presence for ourselves felt. But in a moment like the present, which involves an incredible confluence of different types of crises, the questions in the book bleed into the rest of the world in all of these different ways. a b "Legacy Russell on Glitch Feminism, Curating and the Upside of Growing Up in New York". Cultured Magazine. 2019-01-25 . Retrieved 2020-06-17.