"Failure" got a glow-up sometime in the last 20 years. Instead of something to be feared, gurus tell us to embrace failure. That failure is a waypoint on the path to success. But this shift in our relationship with failure has only further inscribed the winner-loser binary that causes so much of our anxiety about the future.
What if "failure" wasn't part of the "success" formula? What if we looked beyond conventional notions of failure and success to question whether those ideas even matter at all? Whether they serve us at all?
Today on the podcast, Kate Tyson (Strathmann) is queering failure. She's questioning what it means to build a business or a project without the normative notions of success and failure. And how calling those norms into question allows us to imagine new and different ways to do business—or any kind of venture.
"Queer Failure" is an excerpt from [Im]Possible Business by Kate Tyson.
Footnotes:
- [Im]Possible Business by Kate Tyson
- Follow Kate's writing on Substack
- The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam
- Fox Market and Bar in Montpelier, Vermont
- "Don't Bail Out the Restaurant Industry" by Tunde Wey
- Saidiya Hartman
- Étaín Underthings
- Runway's Entrepreneur Universal Basic Income program
- Wanderwell Bookkeeping and Consulting
- "Queer Theory" by Nancy Harding in Key Concepts in Critical Management Studies