It’s Us!: Embracing Disruption through Feminist Approaches to Video Editing

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, my creative process as a performance art practitioner has developed into one that joyously embraces disruption and ‘glitching’. My final PhD performance piece It’s Us! (2020) took the form of an online video work, which contrasts somewhat with my past live performances. Whilst the decision for this work to take place online was an inevitable one, this experience provided an opportunity to acquire new logic through explicitly adopting a feminist, ironic approach to video editing that celebrated and embraced the messiness of femininity through an engagement with ‘glitching’. Goriunova and Shulgin suggest that a glitch in software “is a mess that is a moment”, and “a possibility to glance at software’s inner structure” (cited in Sundén, 2008, p. 27). Through having to quickly adapt and develop my skills in video editing technology, I explored through It’s Us! how I could use the ‘messy’ edit to expose the construction of my specifically constructed feminine personae whilst making explicit the construction of gender through digital practices. Jenny Sundén argues that gender, femininity in particular, is something that is “fundamentally technological, and hence broken” (2016, p. 23). In other words, Sundén suggests that femininity is a construction and thus likens gender to digital technology in that it is ultimately destined to have moments of glitching and failure. This paper explains how it is through these creative moments of glitching and failure that I cut out and crafted agency through slicing and reordering footage along with digitally manipulating that video work to represent my body as excessive in its feminine representation. This paper reflects on the digital process and format of It’s Us! and how the disruption of the pandemic has encouraged me to work in new productive digital ways. This writing also demonstrates how through this experience I have honed my digital creative practice to capture as much agency as a performer and creative maker as I had in a live transaction with audience members.