Anthology of Failure

Christ’s Cunt is a book of poems that has nothing to do with the Christian God. It has everything to do with the pure insanity of the Christ figure, the hedonism of Christ, and the bloody images and symbols of “His” birth. Washing the feet of the Whore; turning the other cheek; starvation, body mutilation, transformation, wine, miracles, orifices, bleeding. It’s pure rave. This is the first era in history in which we can do medical procedures to change a person’s gender. How monumental that is in human civilization, how monstrous, how absurd this would appear for people in the past. For me, to get a cunt is as monumental an act in the course of history as when Christ first let “him” self be nailed to a phallic plank. I love it.

Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Queer Bibliographic Explorations is a special expanded 5th edition centering on archiving as artistic practice. This manifesto talks to the core of GenderFail collecting and archiving practices that look to the softness as a metaphor for the material and content of artist-made publications. The GenderFail Archive Project is a socially engaged reading room that looks at archiving as practice. The project stems from GenderFail’s desire to share the publications from their personal library archive and give a platform to other publishers that they cherish. This publication features and highlights over a hundred artist books, art books, and zines.

This edition features a new section previously unpublished, showing bibliographies created for exhibitions and programs with the GenderFail Archive project at spaces such as Wendy's Subway, The Studio Museum of Harlem, and Cleveland Institute of Art's Reinberger Gallery.

This publication also features the 4th edition featured section showing seven curated GenderFail Archive Project reading lists from “Publishing Now,” a class I taught from 2021-2023 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. For this course, I wanted the students to read zines and publications being produced in real-time, so I started to digitize my collection as I acquired specific titles that I felt the students would resonate with. Many of the readings for this course were scanned from my collection of over 2,000 zines, artist books, and art books that make up the GenderFail archive. Since we could not meet in person (due to the pandemic), I spent hours scanning zines and artist books to be used as required readings for the course. Each reading list will accompany a link and QR code to read and engage with the complete scanned copies of all 31 featured artist books, art books, and zines.

The Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice: Queer Bibliographic Explorations, is among my most cherished project I’ve published of the over 125 editions I’ve designed and printed with GenderFail.

Notes on Anti-capitalist Solidarity: An Essay for the Working Class Artist was first commissioned by former Artspeak Director/Curator Bopha Chhay and published as part of their BEACON series.

In the essay, Oakley states:

Why do so many artists, designers, and low-wage workers still embrace this system of exploitation without question? Are we so compromised by the false promise of success that we have become numb to the exploitation we endure for the chance of being in a place to exploit others ourselves? Do we want to be in this position? And if not, what can we do to change this?

BEACON is a series that examines how artists’ commitment to wider social movements informs contemporary artistic practice. It will feature texts by artists whose practices engage with language and visual arts. Former Artspeak Director/Curator Bopha Chhay edited the series.

Vulnerability: or Why I show my T*ts & c*ck & b*ll’s in my Performances is a new essay by Yvonne LeBien. This essay speaks to the agency of the trans body in public through LeBien’s years of performing naked in the world as a trans woman. In this time of nightmarish evangelical transphobia, Yvonne’s unapologetic rawness is urgent.

This 60-page, 5x4.5, 5x4.5-inch book is as small as it is crucial in the discourse of trans excellence in a climate of fear by the ignorant.

Empathic Intimacies: A Touch That You Can Really Feellllll is two essays written 2 years apart (April 2020 and April 2022), published together to create a timeline between two points during the pandemic.

The book transcribes a body broken by American empire, that of ex-con Rafael Luis Estrada Requena, hacking itself away from contemporary society. Johanna Hedva, author of Sick Woman Theory, takes the ferocious compulsion to escape (from capitalism, from the limits of the body-machine, from Earth) and channels it into an evisceration of oppression and authority. Equal parts tender and brutal, romantic and furious, On Hell is a novel about myths that trick and resist totalitarianism.

Sticky Fingers' Fortune Teller features wisdom from McKenzie Wark, Octavia E. Butler, Kate Zambreno, bell hooks, Clarice Lispector, Eileen Myles, Kathy Acker, Johanna Hedva, Lou Sullivan, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Anne Boyer.⁣

A3, single colour risograph

The long-awaited essay collection from one of the most influential voices in disability activism that detonates a bomb in our collective understanding of care and illness, showing us that sickness is a fact of life.

In the wake of the 2014 Ferguson riots, and sick with a chronic condition that rendered them housebound, Johanna Hedva turned to the page to How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed? It was not long before this essay, “Sick Woman Theory”, became a seminal work on disability, because in reframing illness as not just a biological experience but a social one, Hedva argues that under capitalism—a system that limits our worth to the productivity of our bodies—we must reach for the revolutionary act of caring for ourselves and others.

How to Tell When We Will Die expands upon Hedva’s paradigm-shifting perspective in a series of slyly subversive and razor-sharp essays that range from the theoretical to the personal—from Deborah Levy and Susan Sontag to wrestling, kink, mysticism, death, and the color yellow. Drawing from their experiences with America’s byzantine healthcare system, and considering archetypes they call The Psychotic Woman, The Freak, and The Hag in Charge, Hedva offers a bracing indictment of the politics that exploit sickness—relying on and fueling ableism—to the detriment of us all.

With the insight of Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, and the wit of Samantha Irby, Hedva’s debut collection upends our collective understanding of disability. In their radical reimagining of a world where care and pain are symbiotic, and our bodies are allowed to live free and well, Hedva implores us to remember that illness is neither an inconvenience or inevitability, but an enlivening and elemental part of being alive.