glitch as antibody
In the body, where everything has a price, I was a beggar.
—Ocean Vuong, “Threshold”
Glitch is anti-body, resisting the body as a coercive social and cultural architecture. We use body to give form to something that has no form, that is abstract, cosmic. Philosopher Jean Luc-Nancy puts it perfectly: “Does anyone else in the world know anything like ‘the body’? It’s our old culture’s latest, most worked over, sifted, refined, dismantled, and reconstructed product.”1 A lot of work is put into trying to give the body form.
Artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson’s notion of the “anti-body,” as introduced in her 1994 essay “Romancing the Anti-body: Lust and Longing in (Cyber)space,” lays useful groundwork for thinking of glitch as a mode of resistance against the social, cultural framework of the body.2 “Like computer viruses,” Leeson writes, anti-bodies “escape extinction through their ability to morph and survive, exist in perpetual motion, navigating parallel conditions of time and memory.”3
The glitch thus advances Leeson’s “anti-body” as a tactical strategy. This strategy becomes operable in the face of the failure of the systematized networks and the frameworks within which we build our lives. Glitches gesture toward the artifice of social and cultural systems, revealing the fissures in a reality we assume to be seamless. They reveal the fallibility of bodies as cultural and social signifiers, their failure to operate only as hegemonic normative formulations of capital weaponized by the state. The binary body confuses and disorients, pitting our interests against one another across modalities of otherness. State power in this way positions us all as foot soldiers at the frontlines of a most dangerous tribal war.
The current conditions of the world, however flawed, ought not to preclude glitched bodies from the right to use imagination as a core component of mobilizing and strategizing with care toward a more sustainable futurity. Leeson observes, “the corporeal body [as we have known it] is becoming obsolete. It is living through a history of erasure, but this time, through enhancements.”4 Glitched bodies rework, glitch, and encrypt traces of ourselves, those new forms of personal digital data left behind. As the understanding of what makes up a “possible” body changes under this pressure, the information associated with our physical forms, now abstracted, changes, too.
We can see example of anti-body in the fictional character and “it girl” Miquela Sousa, known via her Instagram personality Lil Miquela.
Lil Miquela was launched as a profile in 2016; however, it was not until 2018 that Lil Miquela claimed the identity of a sentient robot. Created by an LA-based company called Brud with the aspiration of becoming a prototype of “the world’s most advanced AI,” Lil Miquela is described by the Brud Team as “a champion of so many vital causes, namely Black Lives Matter and the absolutely essential fight for LGBTQIA+ rights in this country. She is the future.” Yet, Lil Miquela has no body.




We wonder: What purpose can a body that has no body serve? In the face of an increasingly privatized world, can a corporate avatar—in essence, a privatized body, symbolic in form—be an authentic advocate, a catalyst toward social change? Lil Miquela’s Instagram profile advances the archetype of the influencer, capitalizing on the heightened visibility by using the platform to promote key political causes. Any given day, one might find shout-outs to @innocenceproject, @lgbtlifecenter, or @justiceforyouth on her profile.
On the one hand, it could be argued that Lil Miquela epitomizes a perverse intersection of a neoliberal consumer capitalism and advocacy; on the other, she, being AI and therefore “without” a body, epitomizes what becomes possible with avatar perform-ativity. She is a newfangled opportunity to make visible the invisible, to weirdly engage with new audiences, to push the limits of corporeal materiality and reconsider how we might (re)define the body as we have always known it.
The work and life of artist Kia LaBeija furthers our exploration of anti-body as a vehicle within glitch feminism. LaBeija, who is Black and Filipino, is a queer woman living with HIV. Born Kia Michelle Benbow, the surname “LaBeija” derives from the legendary House of LaBeija, founded in either 1972 or 1977 (the exact year remains a point of contention) by the house’s original mother, the drag queen Crystal LaBeija.
The structure of “houses,” intended to operate as chosen family units, is a survival strategy in itself, creating space for historically othered bodies. These important spaces are long-fought-for and celebrated epicenters of performance, nightlife, and queer culture. Houses compete against one another in voguing battles, a practice that originated in Harlem in the 1970s and has since grown into a well-recognized global phenomenon. Though she is no longer a member of the House of LaBeija, LaBeija in her own creative practice employs vogue dancing as well as storytelling and photography, self-documenting and self-defining a core component of her creative expression.
LaBeija in her very existence is a living legacy of the HIV and AIDS movement. The artist explains, “I was born in 1990, and medication that put you on a regimen that was expected to save your life didn’t come around until, like, 1996, so people weren’t sure babies with HIV of my age would survive.”5 Born nine years after the official start of the AIDS epidemic, LaBeija “complicates [the] idea of what a long-term survivor looks like.”6 LaBeija engages the practice of voguing in public space, her dancing a form of resistance and celebration, an embodiment of queer histories, and a decolonization of what the artist has called “a gay, white man’s story.”7 In circulating self-portrait documentation of herself over years, LaBeija carries forth the torch of HIV and AIDS activism that was first lit in the 1980s by groups such as ACT UP and Gran Fury, who created new modes of visual culture and representation to alter the discourse surrounding bodies affected by HIV and AIDS.
Recollectors: Stories of Children Who Lost Parents to HIV/AIDS
A Storytelling Show at NYC AIDS Memorial
Join us as we highlight this important, underrepresented perspective on the AIDS epidemic, as children who lost parents to the disease share in remembrance and community.
Saturday, Oct 21, 2023
4-6PM
NYC AIDS Memorial
“WHENEVER I COME INTO A SPACE, I imagine what stories it has to tell”
In her self-portraits, LaBeija performs both as herself and beyond herself as an avatar, no longer Kia Michelle Benbow as she was born, but now in the “greatest role of all” as LaBeija.8 Her sharply theatrical compositions blur the boundary between the real and surreal.
In “Eleven” (2015), LaBeija photographs herself in her doctor’s office, wearing her high-school prom dress, a decadent crush of tulle and lace in stark contrast with the sterile reality of a regular routine of health maintenance and HIV care. In this image LaBeija performs the ritual of dressing up for prom, engaging in the American fantasy of having one night before graduating where a teenager can live out one’s most epic dreams.
Eleven, 2015. 20 x 30 Edition of 3.
A LETTER TO DAD Dear Dad, You're nothing more than a collection of images and ideas that I've managed to piece together with what you left behind. Trying to know is you like trying to write a book in a language I can't read that only you can speak. As soon as I think I've formed a sentence, it slips off the page and becomes nothing more than an idea. I still can't tell if you were trying to hide from us, or if like me you couldn't find the words either. When I was young I used to imagine what it would be like for you to take me to prom, teach me how to drive…stuff like that. But…What happened to you? Where did you go when you disappeared? What did you think of the world around you? How did it feel to be in your body when it began to betray you? Did you think about Angela Davis and the Black Panthers? What did it feel like to have drugs coursing through your veins? What did it feel like to run your fingers along a fence? When you jumped the turnstile at Broadway Junction did you ever think about me? Did you imagine that you'd bring me into the world and that ALL THIS WOULD BE THE RESULT??! Did you imagine that I might follow you and be one-stop behind you the entire time? I think about you all the time, but why? Like, what’s the point in pining after another man who doesn’t even know me? I was thinking about you the other day. I was in Brooklyn, not far from my house. Brooklyn often makes me think of you. I try and retrace your footsteps. I imagine you sitting on a stoop, waiting at a corner, or in the arms of…someone. I was standing at a crosswalk and just before I stepped into the street a young Black man ran across the intersection. There was a shout and a gunshot. I turned towards the sound and about 10 feet away from me was a Black man pointing a gun into the air and shouting. He looked like he felt like a king. So I bowed. I threw my body to the ground and with my face pressed against the pavement and waited. When it was quiet and then RAN. The first person I thought about was you. I thought about you running for your life. Pause And you wanna know what’s crazy. I was on the phone with Mom. The entire time. Love, Eleanor
A LETTER TO DAD Dear Dad, You're nothing more than a collection of images and ideas that I've managed to piece together with what you left behind. Trying to know is you like trying to write a book in a language I can't read that only you can speak. As soon as I think I've formed a sentence, it slips off the page and becomes nothing more than an idea. I still can't tell if you were trying to hide from us, or if like me you couldn't find the words either. When I was young I used to imagine what it would be like for you to take me to prom, teach me how to drive…stuff like that. But…What happened to you? Where did you go when you disappeared? What did you think of the world around you? How did it feel to be in your body when it began to betray you? Did you think about Angela Davis and the Black Panthers? What did it feel like to have drugs coursing through your veins? What did it feel like to run your fingers along a fence? When you jumped the turnstile at Broadway Junction did you ever think about me? Did you imagine that you'd bring me into the world and that ALL THIS WOULD BE THE RESULT??! Did you imagine that I might follow you and be one-stop behind you the entire time? I think about you all the time, but why? Like, what’s the point in pining after another man who doesn’t even know me? I was thinking about you the other day. I was in Brooklyn, not far from my house. Brooklyn often makes me think of you. I try and retrace your footsteps. I imagine you sitting on a stoop, waiting at a corner, or in the arms of…someone. I was standing at a crosswalk and just before I stepped into the street a young Black man ran across the intersection. There was a shout and a gunshot. I turned towards the sound and about 10 feet away from me was a Black man pointing a gun into the air and shouting. He looked like he felt like a king. So I bowed. I threw my body to the ground and with my face pressed against the pavement and waited. When it was quiet and then RAN. The first person I thought about was you. I thought about you running for your life. Pause And you wanna know what’s crazy. I was on the phone with Mom. The entire time. Love, Eleanor
Reflecting on this image, LaBeija notes: “I’m wearing my prom dress because when I first began to see [my primary physician], no one knew if I would make it to prom.”9 In “Mourning Sickness” (2014) LaBeija features herself somberly resting on the bathroom floor, yet illuminated with a pale light that amplifies the aqueous colors of the shower curtain, bathmat, and mirror. The lighting lends to the portrait a staged feel, giving it drama in its cinematic texture. LaBeija has said of this portrait: “[This image] tells the story of the many hours I’ve spent in my bathroom, lying on the floor feeling dizzy or nauseous because of the violent medications that I have to take every day. It also evokes locking myself in the bathroom and grieving for my mother’s passing. I still deal with these feelings, and probably always will.”10 LaBeija, by way of her creative practice and advocacy work, gestures toward a long lineage of folx that worked hard to make space, take up space, and explore their range.
Mourning Sickness, 2014. 20 x 30 Edition of 3.
LaBeija’s embrace of her history is a marked “consent not to be a single being”: the artist’s work demonstrates the complexity of her range, her portraits “expressing] the beauty and pain of women who live with HIV” while her voguing practice allows her “to express [herself] through movement and connect with the brown and Black queer community.”11 Through her self-expression, LaBeija cracks open the plausibility of containing multitudes not only as a creative action, but as a political one.
Between the creative practices of Lil Miquela and Kia LaBeija respectively, we see examples of two very different types of bodies that deploy the imaginary as a computational strategy of survival. Each is a glitch that jars the construct of corporeality. As embodiments of persistent refusal, both performers wander within a wildness of unrecognizable being, actively re-imagining and recentering neoteric realities. Each provides us the opportunity to reimagine what a body means, how it can be redefined, what it can do, and what to continue celebrating.
07 – Glitch Is Anti-Body
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus” in Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, translated by Richard Rand, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 7.
Lynn Hershman Leeson, “Some Thoughts on the Data Body” (1994) in Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, edited by M. Paul Lovejoy and V. C. Vesna, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Amelia Abraham, “Photographing Black, Female, HIV Positive Power,” Refinery29, December 30, 2016, refinery29.com.
Hugh Ryan, “Power in the Crisis: Kia LaBeija’s Radical Art as a 25-Year-Old, HIV-Positive Woman of Color,” Vice, June 6, 2015, vice.com.
Amelia Abraham, “Photographing Black, Female, HIV Positive Power,” Refinery29, December 30, 2016, refinery29.com.
Alex Fialho, “Kia LaBeija,” Artforum, January 2018, artforum.com.
Jasmin Hernandez, “In Conversation with Kia Labeija: Using Positivity to Trigger Awareness, Acceptance and Activism for HIV/AIDS,” Gallery Gurls, December 21, 2015, gallerygurls.net.