Glitchcrafting as Rehearsal

This performance lecture emerges from my larger critical and creative project, “Ima Put a Computational Hex on You,” which explores some of the weird and witchy contours of our algorithmic ordinary. Here, I consider “gooning”—prolonged, digitally mediated masturbation sessions often aimed at inducing a trance state—as a compellingly messy site where contemporary sexual citizenship is being actively contested and reconfigured. While attentive to powerful infrastructures that shape contemporary engagements with technology—ecological and attentional extraction, a shrinking digital commons, and the machine zone’s algorithmic seduction—I’m most interested in gooning as a productive ritual. Gooning forges identities, cultures, and alternative relationalities through engagements with in/human others. Here, masculinities are hexed, embracing celebrated abjection within goon caves and on Discord servers. Social codes and normative embodiments alike are contested, overridden, and transformed.

Gooning, particularly through some of its witchier aesthetics and practices, casts spells that actively re-code or elude dominant notions of sexual citizenship. It is less a claim for rights within a shrinking public sphere and more a lateral practice of “un-citizenship,” resonating with concepts of fugitivity from Black study. This is not techno-rationality; it is an ecstatic giving of oneself over to the phallus, to other men, to technology, to desire itself in ways can “witch and warp” normative notions of pleasure and of intimate belonging. I explore gooning as a lens through which to explore enchanted erotic commons that foster deagentive/desubjectified forms of becumming technology, silicon, plastic, phallus, animal, sissy, queer. The “goon state” itself—an ego dissolution achieved through erotic repetition and technological interface—may function as a portal, a “glitchcraft” that reconfigures relations between bodies, technology, and biopolitical governance. Might these often unsettling practices constitute potent acts of fugitive (un)citizenship, offering pathways to reimagine sexual belonging beyond biopolitical capture and normative expectations?