A translation is the invention of a new book. The last inseparable layer of sediment from the original text, and yet distinctly different.
Digital Fissures, like any other book, wasn’t born the moment it was published, but rather, a good year before. Before becoming paper it was synapses, pixels, notes, trips, seminars, conferences, meetings, websites.
Now we are reading it in a language other than the one in which it was written and we are the first to rediscover it. Thanks to the power and depth of the authors who wrote the essays within it, we learn that Digital Fissures is a book that speaks to the present even though it was written in the recent past.
A translation is not just a transposition or a mimetic exercise; it is an attempt to contaminate worlds.
Here, translation is a way of trespassing, pushing our southern European transfeminist perspectives beyond their borders. Trespassing is part of our geography of margins. Speaking of margins, we want to remember bell hooks in this current moment from which we speak. bell hooks is in Digital Fissures more than was made explicit in the Italian edition, and we want to take advantage of the English version to thank her.
The fissure is an unmendable tear. From our transfeminist perspective it contains the marginal and the vulnerable. While cisheteropatriarchal society demands two bodies and assigns two roles, the fissure undoes the binarism and, in the transparency of thinning skin, reveals the norms’ other.
The fissure is the transgression (hooks), the monstrosity (Stryker), the art of failure (Halberstam), opposition to enforced identity (Aizura).
Digital Fissures was born as an act of contamination, an interweaving, a translation of debates, of stories and practices that spoke to the relationship between bodies, genders and technologies; it began with the specificity of our being situated within Italy, in a yesterday very close to today. Digital Fissures was a textual iteration of the story and the genealogy of an Italian transfeminism formed in the marginal spaces of cities and politics, in the cooperatives and the creative battle against a rhetoric-laden catholic, patriarchal social structure. In its encounter with technologies, this battle is capable of generating worlds like FikaFutura or MeduseCyborg, among others, (these are, not by chance, part of the same story as AgenziaX, the publishing house for the Italian edition); capable of generating experiences that mix care with hacking, vibrators with pamphlets. A battle that was frequently fueled by resources from other parts of southern Europe, resources that spoke more Castilian, Catalan or Basque than English, resources that created networks that were often invisible to official
Bringing this journey into another language doesn’t just mean translating these texts, it means giving space to thoughts that are born in another language, thoughts that incorporate terms–often English ones–from technology and debates on gender, dirtying them with the many dialects that speak them. The process of translation covered a span of time that invested our bodies, the modes and practices of our beings that we had described in the introduction to the Italian edition as being marked by an im/materiality devoid of hierarchy. In this interval–between the publication of the Italian edition and the English one–we learned that a global pandemic imposes hierarchies between digital and analog spaces, times, desires, bodies and technologies. Social distancing and the economic recession redefined the marginal spaces, spaces that became more and more crowded. The subjects that live in these spaces today are the same as they were before, but now they are more: domestic violence and femicide increased during the lockdown, and this ascending curve seems to have inserted itself perfectly in the context of a structural health emergency; the worst consequences in terms of livability and privation are those that hit poor-migrant people and people asking for asylum, lgbtqia+, sex-workers, hiv-positive folk, cis women involved in abusive relationships, and people without stable housing.
Technologies have a strange relationship to time. Often associated with novelty, with acceleration, with productivity, they participate in the construction of a precarious, exclusionary present. But they are also tools that we construct from the ground up, tools we appropriate to produce an alternate pace of life, to build memories and ecologies of cyberfeminist relations. In the context created by the pandemic, our bodies and our feelings continue to give life to practices of care, to relationships, to sexuality, and to participation, including in spaces mediated by technology. From our positionality we like to think that the effect of time on (technological?) fissures is unforeseen and does not respond to a prescribed linearity.
In keeping with the transformative potential of transfeminism that emerged from Digital Fissures, we rediscover a new potential in the assemblage of practices, experiences and embodiments of these translated words and terms with which this project speaks four years later.
Carlotta Cossutta, Valentina Greco, Arianna Mainardi and Stefania Voli
January 16th, 2022