Digital Fissures is a work of plurality. It is a collection of transfeminist writings testifying to the challenges we are confronted with as queer-bodied, queer-minded thinkers, as well as to the challenges posed by these transfeminist scholars and activists to the systems of power that seek to marginalize, oppress and disenfranchise. In this volume we hear stories of academic activists in Paris, queer cartographers in Rome, and (trans)gender archivists in Barcelona, among many others advocating for a reimagining of the interaction between our bodies and the power systems that organize our world. By adding to the mix our voices as translators, and our own multiply-situated identities, we participate in this call to action, amplifying these stories and making them accessible to a global, English-speaking audience. It is with this spirit of collaboration that we invite you, the reader, to be an active partner as you bring your own experiences to these pages.
One of the consistent themes throughout the pages of this volume is precisely this commitment to bringing the personal to bear on the political, on the radical, on the bodily, on the technological. We see this for example when Rachele Borghi takes us on stage with her as her collaborative ethnography-performance challenges the norms of academia at Parisâs Sorbonne University. Similarly, the queer creator of eva kunin invites us into the intimacy of their Roman hangouts, bars and bookstores as they reimagine cartography, urban space and the line between the physical (âreal worldâ) and the digital (âvirtual worldâ). And in âDis/organizing diy Sexuality: A Trans Perspective,â Ludovico Virtù weaves together a discussion of the intimate pleasures of sex toys with a critique of consumerism and capitalist production. In each case, the divide between author and subject is intentionally blurred to force us to pay attention to our own practices of distancing and interpretation.
This translation is our participation in this praxis, in the creation of language and ideas through our bodies and technologies. We see this work as a mediated interpretation of the Italian text, which is then mediated by you, the reader, who positions it and understands it within the context of your own lived experience. To use translator Kate Briggsâs metaphor, âWhen the gym is so full of bodies I canât see the instructor, I copy the woman in front of me, and the woman behind me copies me in turn. In this way we share the moves around. We get to dance themâthe pleasure of actually getting to dance them! Someone elseâs moves, only this time made with my own bodyâfalling in and out of sync
Briggsâ metaphor brings to light this sense of action or movement that is so present in the act of translation; one might think that this is a direct movement between two languages, a game of substitution from one Italian term to the corresponding English one, but in truth it is much messier. In fact, our interest in this process is in its movement, movement that involves our bodies and the generative bodies of our work together, just like the bodies at the gym teaching each other through a sweaty game of bodily telephone. The very act of our play and our choices moves and shifts the languages in and through which we work, dismantling notions of linguistic stability. In âA Scene of Intimate Entanglements, or, Reckoning with the âFuckâ of Translation,â Elena Basile explains that languages and subjectivities are constantly policed in an effort to maintain the fiction of their boundaries, but âthe movement of translation, when attentively pursued as movement, puts pressure on the very frame of linguistic enclosure upon which the purported representational stability of source and target texts is predicated.â2 So what we have with translation is a performance of destabilization. The entanglements of languages and of words is a performance of unraveling, of coming undone.
This unraveling is at the heart of this very text. In the original title Smagliature digitali, the word âSmagliatureââin Italianâspeaks to a process of unraveling and the word, like the action, is elusive, taking us in various directions at the same time as it unfurls towards different meanings and contexts. As we approached the task of translating the title, we followed these different threads, pulling on each one as we unraveled the piece and built it anew, testing English terms for their fit with the meaning, the substance and feel of the body we were remaking and the game we were playing.
I watch the divide between generations widen with time and technology. I watch how desperately we need political memory, so that we are not always imagining ourselves the ever-inventors of our revolution; so that we are humbled by the valiant efforts of our foremothers; and so, with humility and a firm foothold in history, we can enter upon an informed and re-envisioned strategy for social/political change in the decades ahead.5
We foreground this reference to the backs and bodies of This Bridge as it speaks to a genealogy of disruption and continuation that is marked on the collective and the individual body. The technological changes Moraga writes about are revisited, mapped out and explored anew in the pages of this new text, as are the ways they can be used to preserve the legacies of queer and feminist actions that came before. This connection between these two bodies of work, and the bodies of which they speak, is reinforced by the word itself, smagliature, which, when broken down presents us with maglia or âsweater,â and that negating âsâ before it, which in Italian is often used to signify the wordâs direct opposite [as in the example formato/sformato = formed/deformed]. Thus, smaglia
Philosopher Lauren Berlant notes: âObjects are always looser than they appear. Objectness is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize.â7 There are deep parallels here between the claims we are making about the play of translation that occurs because of linguistic instabilityâdespite common notions that would have one believe in the concreteness of the sign-referent bondâand Berlantâs understanding of the instability of objectness, an objectness upon which our infrastructures depend. This parallel highlights the ways in which the politics and activism of the chapters in this book are in direct conversation with our work as translators, as we all point to the tenuousness of the social groundwork on which we tread. As readers will see, technological apparatuses and digital spaces have shaped much more than the micro-publics that constitute our affective communities. We share a common digisphere with the writers whose words we translate, a âcommonsâ whose better power, for Berlant, âis to point to a way to view whatâs broken in sociality, the difficulty of convening a world conjointly, although it is inconvenient and hard, and to offer incitements to imagining
In this way, if we go back to the notion of the glitch for a moment, a glitch within the space of the digital might provide us an occasion to collectively reflect on and reshape those infrastructures that give shape to our lives, a glitch that marks a moment where tools like technology might be taken up. From the place of this glitch, this fissure, new commons, new intimate publicsâwho affectively come together and reject the âbrokennessâ of this glitchâare formed.
Together with you, reader, we seek to shake the building blocks of the infrastructures that establish and preserve racist heteronormative misogynist institutions and ways of living.
Julia Heim and Sole Anatrone
Kate Briggs, This Little Art (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), 212.
Elena Basile, âA Scene of Intimate Entanglements, or, Reckoning with the âFuckâ of Translation,â in Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, eds. Brian James Baer, Klaus Kaindl (Routledge: New York, 2017), 31, 30.
Anna Gorchakovskaya, âDigital Stretch Marks: Bodies, Genders and Technologies,â Digicult, Accessed July 18th, 2019.
Cossutta et al, âWhere the Margins Arenât Borders,â infra, 20.
CherrÃe Moraga, âCatching Fire: Preface to the Fourth Edition,â in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. CherrÃe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Albany: suny Press, 2015), xix.
With this elaboration of âglitchâ we are explicitly referencing Lauren Berlantâs use of âglitchâ in her elaboration of the relationship between the commons and infrastructure in âThe Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Timesâ in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3), 2016, pp. 393â419.
Lauren Berlant, âThe Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times,â Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34: 3: 394.
Berlant, 395.