glitch as antibody

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 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.

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.

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

1. Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus” in Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, translated by Richard Rand, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 7.

2. 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.

3. Amelia Abraham, “Photographing Black, Female, HIV Positive Power,” Refinery29, December 30, 2016, refinery29.com.

4. 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.

5. Amelia Abraham, “Photographing Black, Female, HIV Positive Power,” Refinery29, December 30, 2016, refinery29.com.

6. Alex Fialho, “Kia LaBeija,” Artforum, January 2018, artforum.com.

7. 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.