Troubling failure(s): Situating bodies in research and art (AMS Committee on Women and Gender Endowed Lecture)

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?