PositiveBookforumLegacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism takes Walt Whitman’s \'I am large, I contain multitudes,\' as a kind of fugal subject, expanding glitch feminism in scope with each repetition ... A refusal to be pinned down extends to the form of the book itself, which variously presents itself as a work of media theory, memoir, and manifesto, while primarily existing in the third register. This can result in some frustratingly unfulfilled promises ... glitch feminism takes technology primarily as an aestheticized metaphor. That’s not necessarily a failing, even if it does lead to some meandering ... Glitch Feminism, unfortunately, sometimes feels more like poeticized vaporware. That feeling lessens in the book’s last third, when Russell addresses the racialized construction of gender. She throws out a number of intriguing provocations ... I often wanted Russell to complicate and deepen these ideas, because some are strikingly original ... Still, there is some luminous, and even incandescent prose here, particularly when Russell talks about her early experiments with identity construction online and the gentrification of her hometown ... At its best, Glitch Feminism has that...comforting \'for us by us\' feel.
Ellen Ullman
PositiveBookforumIn a poignant piece in her new essay collection, Life in Code, Ullman describes how she could hear his voice, and in the sine wave that pierced the on-screen static she could see him, too ...the pieces in Life in Code, which span 1994 to 2017, reflect this more wide-screen perspective ... The experience of being a woman who codes — we learn now that it was an acutely lonely path — remains central, but time and distance allow her to reframe a career’s worth of indignities in a couple of different ways ... Ullman’s prose, which often has the concision of clean code, is most seductive in this mode... Life in Code shares its predecessor’s emphasis on the fleshy politics that undergird the industry’s glib tech utopianism. Unfortunately, it often takes a turn for the pedantic, but while it lacks the thrill of Close to the Machine, the critiques it offers are more overtly political.
