Considering the messy, fraught relationship between research and creative artmaking, this presentation contemplates diverse notions of "failure" as a creative, queering process (Haberstam 2011, Hahn 2017, Patel 2017). Offering a selection of precarious cases of unruly artist-scholarship, I problematize varieties of failure-transmission failure, sensory failure, research failure-as a provocation of methodological practices. Might troubling failures serve as a generative practice to complicate embodied cultural knowledge, performance practice, "authenticity," and expressivity? In turn, how might an interrogation of failure(s) shed light on gender, race, and history?