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

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.