This tutorial shares insights into launching the GenderFail publishing platform and how to survive within capitalism.
As artists and designers, we aren’t taught about finding ways to make a living through independent practices. Given the challenges faced by practitioners from low-income or working-class backgrounds, the pursuit of creative dreams is often fraught with numerous obstacles and sacrifices—including a burden of debt.
In this tutorial, Be gives insights into their journey of the GenderFail publishing, programming, and archiving platform, discussing how they found ways to make a living off of publishing. As an attempt to have an honest account of advice, true stories, resources, and other information, Be shares their experience from the perspective of a working-class artist and publisher.
The second part of the tutorial dives into GenderFail’s model of profit-for-survival and non-exploitative-profit. “Profit” is essential to continue the platform’s activities and sustain those working and publishing around GenderFail. However, to say that the platform is “for-profit” does not speak to the complexities of a non-capitalist small publishing project. To GenderFail, “profit” means continuing the work without other means of capital, and, most importantly, to make money for others—to create profit-for-labor.
Event language: English with close-captions.
Be Oakley (they/them) is an artist, writer, and publisher based in the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking), or Ridgewood/Queens, New York, USA. In 2015 they founded GenderFail, a publishing outlet that seeks to instigate works that expand queer subjectivity by looking at queerness as an identity that challenges capitalist, racist, ableist, Zionist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-environmental ideologies. With GenderFail, publishing is personal; it is a tool for disseminating imperfect but powerful ideas.
GenderFail is Be Oakley’s publishing, programming, and archiving platform that seeks to instigate works that expand queer subjectivity.
REGISTER HEREBy registering for this lecture series, you not only enter a transnational community centered around design politics, but you also support the work of commissioning, editing, and publishing original counter-narratives, and help to finance our free online learning program.
The lecture series is accessible through a sliding-scale price structure:
- Solidarity: CHF 290
- Standard: CHF 150
- Student: CHF 70
- Reduced Student: CHF 35
For students with limited finances—particularly those self-identifying as marginalized, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, chronically ill, or disabled—we offer the Reduced Student price. We trust your honesty and do not require proof of self-identification for enrollment.
For institutions keen on facilitating their students’ and staff’s participation (and other bigger groups), we also provide discounted passes. Please contact learning@futuress.org along with the number of participating students and staff, and we would be happy to tailor an offer to your specific needs.
This event is part of the Pressing Issues: Printing Futures, Publishing Resistance paid online series of lectures, tutorials, and roundtable conversations discussing the politics of translating, archiving, and publishing.
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