Imperfect Publishing: 10 years of putting everything I have into GenderFail
Published on the Occasion of the Bookshelf Resdiency: GenderFail at ICALA 
Edition of 1,000
Printed by Newspaper Club
Funded by ICA LA’s Fieldwork Counci
6 - 15 in x 22.75 in pages

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VISIT ICALA

Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Bookshelf Residency: GenderFail
October 5, 2024–March 2, 2025

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Founded in 2015 and based in occupied Munsee Lenape + Canarsie lands (otherwise known as Queens), GenderFail is a publishing and archiving platform founded and run by Be Oakley. According to Oakley, “GenderFail is not non-for-profit but profit-for-survival or profit-to-continue-our-work-without-other-means-of-capital, and most importantly it is to make money for others I publish, to create profit-for-labor.” GenderFail seeks to publish works that expand queer subjectivity by looking at queerness as an identity that challenges capitalist, racist, zionist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-environmental ideologies.



For ICA LA’s Bookshelf Residency, GenderFail will feature such publications as Textdemic: A Retrospective on Jenny Holzer’s Laments (edited by A.L. Steiner); The Metaphysics of Self-Immolation by FT and Riley Hooker; An Incessant Unknowability: An Archive of Protest Inspired Typography and it’s Open Source Uses, and many other titles from their inventory. The Bookshelf Residency serendipitously coincides with the 10th Anniversary of GenderFail. A special broadsheet newsprint publication will commemorate this milestone.



In early December, an Annex gallery exhibition organized by Be Oakley will present GenderFail’s protest-inspired, open-source fonts; notably the handmade-style alphabet type design STAR, inspired by Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries activist banners, featured in the Scientia Sexualis catalogue.