GenderFail

GenderFail (founded in 2015) is Be Oakley's publishing, programming, and archiving platform. GenderFail is not non-profit but profit-for-survival or profit-to-continue-our-work-without-other-means-of-capital and, most importantly, to make money for others I publish, to create profit-for-labor. With GenderFail, publishing is personal; it’s a tool for disseminating imperfect but powerful ideas.

With GenderFail, the project has published over 135 editioned publications with work by numerous artists, including E. Jane, Lex Brown, Legacy Russell, Abigail Lucien, American Artist, Demian Dineyazhi, LA Warman, Paul Soulellis, A.L. Steiner, Eileen Myles, Pamela Sneed, and many others. GenderFail publications can be found in the library collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Brooklyn Museum Library, and over 100 others. GenderFail has exhibited at MoMA PS1 (Past and Future Fictions, 2018), The International Center of Photography (Queering the Collection, 2018), Center for Book Arts (Imperfect Archiving, Archiving as Practice 2021), Women's Studio Workshop (Seize Control of the FDA 2022), Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (An Incessant Unknowability: An Archive of Protest Inspired Typography and It’s Open Source Uses 2024-25).GenderFail was the reception of a 2022-2025 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Grant.