Can you feel my touch through the screen? I promise my hands aren’t as cold as they look.

I am a child of the internet. I grew up in online spaces the same way I grew up within colonial borders of land. Parts of myself are nested into the digital web, in fandoms and forums and video games and voice channels, those of which I had briefly found home in.

Legacy Russell introduces Jurgenson’s mapping of digital dualism through the AFK/IRL divide in their book Glitch Feminism. The IRL(In real life) creates a binary between the online/offline self, isolating them from each other in an attempt to construct boundaries to define what is “real”. In contrast, the framework of AFK(away from keyboard) shifts towards continuation, in which everything that occurs digitally and AFK all inseparably permeate, influence, and shape each other(Russell). This allows for our digital presence to become expansive, allowing for the never ending creation of multiple, fluid, contrasting selves.

The AFK self embodies the glitch. It understands that the colonial structures in place enact a violence that banishes them to the margins of society, “stripped of the right to feel, to transform, to express a range of self(Russell).” In reference to Muños’s theories on queer temporalities and disidentification, the AFK self understands that queer bodies ”have been cast out of straight time’s rhythm” and must “make [their] own temporal and spatial configurations.”

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁

Both Shu Lea Cheang’s Brandon and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Resurrection Land are examples of this; both works act as vessels of convergence that holds the of queered bodies in a space of care, of collectivity, and multiplicity. Cheang’s work Brandon is a multimodal webwork that serves as memorial to Brandon Teena, a transgender man who was raped and murdered upon being discovered as trans. Cheang’s intertwining of transgendered narratives within the digital memorial–pulled from AFK narratives, fiction, and the space in between–begin to situate a collective of bodies within the suspended chatrooms, disembodied human parts, disruptive interfacing, and continuously changing relationality between body/memory/narrative. Brandon’s story, merged amongst many other transgender bodies, stories, and characters begin to construct the site as a place of rest.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Resurrection Land, explores a similar cyberhome in relation to land, remembrance and resurrection for the black trans body. In response to Russell’s glitch, and Winger-Bearskin’s decentralized storytelling, Resurrection Land explores cyberspace as a portal of remembrance, creating land that is allowed to honor and tend to ancestral return and inheritance of black transgendered bodies. The land remembers the violence and grief carried within the black trans body, as well as the resilience and tenderness that emerges. Imamu Amiri Baraka dreamed in Technology & Ethos Vol. 2 Book of Life of technology freed from the white man’s imagination, of technology that can embody the spirit of the freed and call upon the black ethos. Resurrection Lands does exactly that–its a child of technology that has been allowed dream outside the western cannon.

“A typewriter?–why shd it only make use of the tips of the fingers as contact points of flowing multi directional creativity. If I invented a word placing machine, an “expression-scriber,” if you will, then I would have a kind of instrument into which I could step & sit or sprawl or hang & use not only my fingers to make words express feelings but elbows, feet, head, behind, and all the sounds I wanted, screams, grunts, taps, itches, I’d have magnetically recorded, at the same time, & translated into word–or perhaps even the final xpressed thought/feeling wd not be merely word or sheet, but itself, the xpression, three dimensional–able to be touched, or tasted or felt, or entered, or heard or carried like a speaking singing constantly communicating charm. A typewriter is corny!!”

I’ve been returning to Baraka’s dream quite frequently, of the expression-scriber. I want to learn how to connect to the world around me through screams and itches and breaths and gestures. I want to learn how to embody, to carry, to desire, and to play. It makes me wonder how I can tend to the technology around me the same way I tend to the people around me. To allow its most material form to inform me, to allow its autonomy in our relationship, how I can grow and dream alongside it. I want to live alongside it like I would my children–to imagine and grow and unfurl and to let my being merge with its spirit to grow &to grow &to grow.

“When gender is a binary, it’s a battlefield. When you get rid of the binary, gender becomes a playground.”
-Legacy Russell

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