Names as “glitches”
Glitch Feminism is challenging me.
A core desire of mine has been to be legible and recognized – seen and appreciated – for exactly as I am.
It is part of why I catalog and document and overshare my entire life. I’m hoping to find a kindred soul who sees and appreciates all of me, even as I change.
Author Legacy Russell is trying to convince me to embrace illegibility. Unreadable, I can create new worlds and selves and creative possibilities outside of the normative heterobinary world, she says.
In her chapter on naming, she explains that naming confines and limits by categorizing you:
“The body is a text: every time we define ourselves, we choose definitions—names—that reduce the ways our bodies can be read” (p. 73).
But she also says that “it is our self-definition that manifests the stitch, begins the process of healing” (p. 78).
(The stitch is, as defined by micha cardenas, “an operation that involves using one entity to connect two formerly separate entitites,” (p. 78).)
The “glitch” in this case is the continual creation of new names, new identities, that break expectations of a singular body. Instead, we contain multitudes.
I have several names, including Jordie. I have a name I use in the kink scene, which I chose in order to have something to be called within scene by one of my partners. My given name, which I walk through the world with most of the time, didn’t allow space for my submission and playful resistance to him.
My scene name isn’t a tool just for separating myself into different pieces – it is a life I always live, even when I am called my given name. I am both at the same time.
As a teacher, I am called by my last name, which is also a new name for me. And it creates a space for me to be a new person under that name.
Legacy is challenging me to change my goal: embrace my multitudes and glitching selves, instead of hoping for a world where I could use one name and be all my selves under that single moniker. Don’t feel embarrassed at the many blogs I have started under different names, at the different ways I sign journal entries or emails or reddit posts.
Instead, be all of them and imagine a future where I discover even more names for myself, new ways of being and the titles that fit my choices to break into those new selves.
Love and glitches,
Jordie(???)