Willingness to Fail and Gaga Feminism
In the final chapter of Aubrey Anable’s book, Playing With Feelings, entitled “Games to Fail With,” she discusses how our modern conception of failure is viewed as something for us to be ashamed of. In the fashion of Marxist critics she writes, “In the American capitalist imaginary, failure — as an externally measured condition and as a subjective condition associated with fear, shame, and anger — is so unacceptable that it must be enveloped within a larger a narrative of progress. ‘One fails forward toward success.’ Yet capitalism is dependent on failure and its control. It requires that many of us fail, and it also relies on us putting an optimistic spin on failure or wallowing in self-loathing and shame so as to not experience a compelling reason to revolt” (104). We are taught that failure is to be avoided at all costs, and that it is always our burden to bear, regardless of circumstance. This of course adheres to the grand narrative of “the American dream” in which anyone, everyone, can succeed in the United States. Even as I try to work my way out of capitalist ways of making meaning, because of that training, it’s hard to imagine failure as something positive, something worthwhile as an experience, not tied to how I learned from it and how tomorrow I might succeed.
As I was reading this, however, I was reminded of J. Jack Halberstam’s book, Gaga Feminism, which called for a form of feminism in which we do not advocate for equality in our current society. Rather we perform a kind of anarchic feminism, in which we reject much of the current ways in which society and meaning are constructed. We see that the issues that women face (and other minorities, and even men) are not simply the result of not being able to participate in society and economy in the same way that male white men do, but that those systems of organizing people are flawed in themselves.
In Anable’s discussion of failure (which, for the record, does invoke another book by Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure) there seems to be a similar suggestion of the radical rethinking that Halberstam advocates for. Failure is dangerous to capitalism. It’s the inability to perform the work required for capitalism to function. The embrace of failure, then, could be an intentional rejection of capitalist notions. Again, this is hard to conceptualize. We all must eat, after all, and that too is a pressure of capitalism. That we all must participate in the system to survive in it. For academics to publish their opinions on capitalism and academia they must pursue careers in academia. We must succeed in the way that capitalism expects us to, to even have a platform for criticizing that system. Perhaps we are not in a place where we can feasibly embrace failure in such a liberating way, but maybe we can be more tolerant of failure, be more willing to engage in activities in which we might fail, and relish those experiences whether we do or don’t fail. Maybe that’s the first step to understanding failure in a new way, and dethroning such grand narratives as the American dream.
