Pending System Change: Recontextualizing Transgender Glitch Art as Disability Aesthetic

Abstract

This article critically examines the powerful and subversive yet broken glitch. Within hegemonic and normative structures, the glitch as a failure to function works to refuse to perform, disrupt, slow or break systemic norms within artistic representation. Artworks such as Digital TV Dinner (1978) have carved out a place for transgender artists and scholars to thoroughly analyze systemic understandings of gender in order to perform “calculated failures.” Through creating an imagined alternative to the norm, trans glitch art and scholarship decontextualize, detach and displace disability, despite clear disability aesthetics. In Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers (2010) notes that disability as an aesthetic in modern art challenges normative representations of the body. Yet, when disability is merely an aesthetic or a metaphor, the lived experiences of disabled people are distanced. Drawing on Siebers’ notion of disability aesthetics, this article seeks to recontextualize disability by examining the trans analysis of glitch art, wherein disability aesthetics are present through vandalism and seeing beauty in the broken, the use of the language of function in glitches and the connection of trans glitch art to Donna Haraway’s cyborg. To fully use glitches as a critical and oppositional tool to challenge normative notions of how the body functions, disability must be recontextualized. For now, systematic change is pending.