Technologies always implicate their own failures, breakdowns, and glitches. The purpose of this article is to develop an understanding of gender in general – and femininity in particular – as something fundamentally technological, and, as such, broken. Drawing on the technological undercurrent in current posthumanist feminist theory, arguing for a re-introduction of technologies in the midst of feminist posthumanist critique, the author puts into play a vocabulary of malfunctioning, broken, vulnerable technologies of gender. In particular, the term “glitch” is put to use to account for machinic failures in gender within the digital domain. By using glitch as a way of theorizing gender, the article is a dual contribution to digital media studies and feminist theory in a technological vein. Glitch is the spinning wheel on the computer screen, the delay between a command given and its execution. Etymologically, glitch (possibly) derives from the Yiddish word glitsh, meaning a “slippery place” or “a slip.” Glitch signals the slipperiness of something or someone off balance and a loss of control. It usually refers to a sudden unexpected event, a surge of current or an illegitimate signal that breaks the flow of energy, information, and affect. Glitch is, fundamentally, a struggle with binary code. Gender is a similar struggle to cope with binaries, with a loss of binaries, and about what happens when the vulnerability of the system is revealed. On this side of glitch, the tendency is toward hesitation and anticipation, irritation and annoyance, as well as pain and anxiety in the face of technologies and bodies that skip, crash, or get stuck. The default mode of gender is technological failure, and cis-gender normativity – what the author calls gender “high fidelity” – an unobtainable ideal of impossible perfection. If to glitch is to slip, to stutter, to stumble, gender high fidelity is to slip by unnoticed. In contrast to the notion of cis-gender normativity as a desire to cover or remove “noise,” to clear the channel, glitch is that which infiltrate, make dirty, and ultimately put pressure on the norms and ideals that structure gender as pure, clear, cold, binary code. In this sense, glitch is also about a perceived beauty in crashing and skipping, holding an intriguing critical, aesthetic, activist potential. In the hands of glitch artists, circuit breakers, and gamers, but also queers, and trans-performers, glitch becomes a celebration of the beauty of malfunction and gender-technological fragility.

For a feminist scholar of technology, contemporary steampunk cultures incorporate several interesting elements. They embrace playful ways of relating to technology. They contain thrifty Do-It-Yourself strategies and ethics of recycling, linking the crafting of sexually specific bodies to imaginative time-play. They involve an intermingling of technological extensions with modes of embodiment and costuming. The corset is an emblematic Victorian, industrial technology in steampunk costuming, altering bodies and affects as well as aesthetics and politics. But how far can white, Victorian, middle-class, imperialist, corseted femininity be ‘punked’, twisted, modified, or transformed? And how much do these transpositions in and through time get caught up in a machinery of repetition rather than revision? Or are there ways of thinking the old and the new differently altogether?

This paper develops an understanding of gender as something fundamentally technological, and as such broken. Drawing on the technological undercurrent in current posthumanist feminist theory, it puts into play a vocabulary of malfunctioning, broken, vulnerable technologies, and in particular uses the term ‘glitch’ to account for machinic failures in gender within the digital domain. As an intriguing example of the technologies of (trans)gender, the core example consists of the social media presence and public transition of Isabella Bunny Bennett — a musical performer and a member of the U.S.-based band Steam Powered Giraffe. Drawing on how glitch is understood as an accidental error and a critical potential in aesthetic practices, the article is a contribution to what recently has been coined ‘glitch feminism.’

In the midst of the affective networks of contemporary digital cultures, something seemingly of the opposite order is taking shape. It is a culture that contrasts speed with slowness, displaces the new with the old and the used, and replaces supposedly immaterial streams of data with highly material, tactile technologies, materials and fabrics. This chapter turns to steampunk cultures as compelling examples of a contemporary affective investment in the analog, coupled with intense digital connectivity. Drawing on affect theory in a neo-materialist vein, the author formulates a critique of Brian Massumi’s notion of the superiority of the analog and suggests that steampunk, rather than being understood as analog nostalgia, is more aptly understood in terms of the transdigital. The term transdigital accounts for analog passions that are shaped through the digital in ways that concretely activate, but also move across the borders of, or beyond the digital. Steampunk, rather than merely being a return to a bygone era, is a re-consideration, or transing, of the (digital) present. Within this chapter, steampunk is used as an especially intriguing example of a broader tendency toward transdigital modes of using and sensing media in contemporary media landscapes.

This article takes as its point of departure the social media presence of a human musical automaton called Rabbit. As part of the US-based band Steam Powered Giraffe, Rabbit is performed by Bunny Bennett, who recently came out as a transgender woman. As a result of this shift, Rabbit is being transformed from a male automaton into a transgender female robot. The news of the transformation hit like a bomb in the emotionally invested fan base. The story of the transitioning robot is an intimate coming together of technologies, imagination, and transgender embodiment. It is a story that deserves scholarly attention for two reasons: This case offers ways of re-casting the discussion in transgender studies within a post-humanist framework of somatechnics. Secondly, it is a case which foregrounds an understanding of gender as a question of time. In focusing on transition as a continuous, open-ended process, gender is primarily understood as a temporal form which cuts or vibrates through the body in highly material, embodied ways. The domain of queer temporality is rather densely theorised, but what about trans- temporality? If queer temporality first and foremost deals with sexuality and time, what would it mean to shift the focus to gender? Drawing on Gilles Deleuze on time, this article is a contribution to the field of transgender studies on the question of trans- temporality in a technological vein.

Steampunk is an aesthetic technological movement incorporating science fiction, art, engineering, and a vibrant 21st century Do-It-Yourself counterculture. This article explores the feminist potentials of ‘thinking with’ steampunk as a playful, affective and decidedly political response to the present technological condition. It starts out by navigating the field of affect theory with a Deleuzian reading of Baruch Spinoza on affect, to then engage in the affective renderings of the relations, rhythms, and power of a soma-technology central to steampunks as well as their Victorian predecessors: the corset. The purpose of the article is (at least) threefold: first, it sets out to complicate the notion of the corset as either oppressive or liberating by a move from signification to affect. Secondly, it aims to put a feminist spin on Spinoza, by offering what Moira Gatens (2000) calls a micropolitical feminism of the in-betweens of subjects (or bodies). The argument, thus, takes seriously the seeming lack of distinction in Spinoza between nature and artifice, which opens up possibilities of exploring the affective relations and the in-betweens of human and nonhuman bodies. Finally, and as a result of this interest in the affective relationality of human and nonhuman bodies, the article contributes to the discussion of ‘somatechnics’ (Sullivan and Murray 2009) by proposing an intimate relationship between somatechnics and affect.

Steampunk – eller vad man på svenska ibland kallar för ångpunk – kan sägas vara en estetisk teknologisk rörelse som inbegriper science fiction, konst, ingenjörskonst och en livfull subkultur. Den kännetecknas av retrofuturistiska drömmar om vad som kunde ha hänt om 1800-talets ångdrivna, mekaniska teknologier hade fått ett annat spelrum. Dess retrofuturism är en anakronism i form av medvetna kronologiska misstag, en inkonsekvent tidslighet som felplacerar personer, händelser, objekt (i det här fallet främst teknologier). Det kan sägas handla om ett fantasins omskapande av det förgångna med hjälp av nutidens teknologiska sensibilitet och kunskap. 

Den här texten följer några centrala teman inom ångpunken i skärningspunkten mellan teknologi, politik och estetik och organiseras i tre delar. Den första delen fokuserar på det första ledet i begreppet ångpunk, alltså ånga, och söker skissera på vilka sätt rörelsen inspireras och drivs av kraften hos maskiner från en svunnen tid. Den andra delen syftar till att ringa in vad som kan sägas vara ångpunkens punketos i termer av samhällskritik, tekniksyn och motståndsstrategier. Den tredje delen kretsar slutligen kring vad som skulle kunna benämnas ångpunkens kroppsanakronismer. Diskussionen koncentreras främst till de betydelseförskjutningar som uppstår då korsetter och urverksmekanik möter en viktoriansk genuslogik för 2000-talet.