What, exactly, are we asking each other and ourselves to normalise?

In a paper about ecological memoirs, grief and restorying, Willis (2009) recounts a memory of a commercial that depicted a woman in a ‘romanticized version of an office space’ with wood panelling and glass partitions. The woman’s forearms began to burn (signified by a red glow that spread up her forearms) as a result of too much typing but then, miraculously, a solution in the form of an analgesic appears on the screen. With the help of this analgesic, the red glow is totally erased and ‘the woman returns happily to her keyboard’ (Willis 2009, 86). Using this example, Willis argues that there is a prevailing societal tendency to portray anything that prevents us from returning ‘happily to keyboards’, thus disrupting business-as-usual, as something that ought to be removed or rubbed out. This issue with defaulting to this stance is that rather than confronting the underlying conditions that led to the painful burning red glow in the first place, it palliates. Further, disruptive, unruly feelings and physical symptoms can be important catalysts for transformation and healing – but only if they’re attended to. While not about failure per se, Willis’s argument offers valuable insights and entryways for those interested in contemplating further the emancipatory potentials of failure.

Many efforts to retrieve failure often end up framing it as a temporary setback in storylines that otherwise inevitably seem to culminate in triumphant endings (Leary 2018). We also see efforts to retrieve failure storying it as the dues we must pay in order to succeed in academia – often characterised by stories meant to ‘inspire’ others that they too can overcome failure if they keep trying or, if not, to see failure as a teacher that builds character and hands out badges for effort (Brien et al. 2013; Cao and Ngetich 2023; Eckstein et al. 2023; Holdsworth 2020; Stefan 2020). It would seem that, at least in part, a persistent belief in the need to ‘normalise’ failure motivates these framings. In this telling, everyone fails and ‘feels like an imposter, so really no-one is’, and the solution is ‘to individually just believe in yourself’ (Breeze and Taylor 2020, 100).

On the face of it, efforts to make failure ‘okay’, whether by opening up conversations about it, lowering its stakes or reframing failure as desirable and pedagogical, would seem to resonate with feminist strategies to politicise individual or personal problems (Breeze and Taylor 2020). However, these framings typically have the opposite effect – that is, failure becomes depoliticised and the broader structural inequities that are embedded in academic systems become further invisibilised (Ahmed 2012; Dolmage 2017; Henry et al. 2017).

What, exactly, are we asking each other and ourselves to be okay with?

Attending to the stories that bodies and emotions tell us about being unruly or disruptive is necessary, even amidst pressure to ‘return happily to keyboards’, but only if these stories are also understood as connected to each other and to their social and political contexts. To demonstrate this, and provide some further background for this argument, this section will focus on (recontextualising) some examples of failure.

The first example comes to us from Tyler Hallmark (2018) who, in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, shares his experience as a sophomore student in the US, captivated by the world of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. Attending ‘countless’ talks, Hallmark would listen to CEOs and ‘start-up wizards’ painting pictures of a business world he initially thought included him – someone from a low-income background (para 2). However, Hallmark began to reconsider this thought after attending a particular talk given by an entrepreneur who shared with the audience how ‘he had borrowed $50,000 from his parents to launch his first start-up and then proceeded to go bankrupt in his first year’ (para 2). The takeaway, according to Hallmark? That risks are necessary and failure is okay. But, for Hallmark, this advice was irreconcilable:

The recurring theme of ‘It’s OK to fail’ didn’t (and still doesn’t) resonate with me, because I couldn’t afford to fail. I didn’t have parents who could lend me $50,000. In fact, $50,000 was more than my single mother could make in three years at her near-minimum-wage job. The lesson I learned was that if I didn’t have money to risk losing, I shouldn’t be in business. (para 3)

Hallmark’s response reminds us that the framing failure as ‘okay’ often relies upon the illusion that there is a separation between failure, the social and political context, and the differential distribution of the consequences associated with failure (see also Feigenbaum 2021a, 2021b). In other words, failure becomes individualised and depoliticised, thus obscuring the structural inequities within academic systems that determine who can reframe failure as something else. Further, for students who face poverty, housing concerns and financial insecurity, success can feel like a matter of life or death (Feigenbaum 2021a). And, for members of historically and systemically marginalised communities, failure and its associated complement of negative feelings are neither fleeting nor simply unfortunate, but ‘unavoidable’ reminders of ‘exclusionary social realities’ (Comstock 2023, 704).

While ‘failure is okay’ stories may counter tendencies to leave failure unspoken, the relations between failure and normative notions of success are left unquestioned. Consequently, failure’s disruptive potential is left unfulfilled. At the same time, adopting failure as a stance (situated in its social and political circumstances) does not have to require the rejection of success. For instance, for some, conforming or ‘blending in’ can signify both ‘assimilation and a lack of recognition’ and thus in many ways feel like a failure (Denny 2010, 110). However, for others, conformity is another way to subvert normative ideals and thus ‘blending in’ can feel like a success.

For another example, I return to my MA thesis – a multiple case study that explored the experiences Indigenous students had with learning to write in contexts of higher education in Canada, where settler-colonial legacies of dispossession and marginalisation continue to shape institutional structures and practices. Throughout our interviews, students recalled numerous encounters with direct and indirect messaging that seemed to be saying they needed to separate their identities and cultures from their writing and learning process if they wanted to be ‘successful’. They recounted experiences with feedback that, in their view, criticised their writing as overly driven by storytelling and, in turn, felt like a swipe at their identity and cultural practices. Consequently, conforming to suggestions that they remove or limit the amount of storytelling in their papers felt like a failure to accept who they are (for example, ‘It’s me. It’s in my identity. If others don’t understand, it’s their loss’). Thus, they felt compelled to resist notions of success (Amell 2016, 85).

One last example, this time from Stewart (2015), whose aim to prioritise Indigenous knowledge(s) and experiences in his dissertation necessitated flouting certain academic writing conventions. In the preface of his dissertation, Stewart shares how he received an initial rejection from his institution’s ethics board because his application was written in a way that conformed with (and affirmed) Stewart’s experience and positionality as a member of the Nisga’a nation. ‘The BREB [Behavioural Research Ethics Board]’, he writes, ‘found the writing style of the original application to be deficient and questioned my writing ability and knowledge of English, suggesting that I hire an editor’ (Stewart 2015, x). Stewart describes having to decide between resubmitting the application in standard edited academic English or to proceed without clearance, and face a ‘high possibility’ of rejection. Weighing the potential for a rejected dissertation, Stewart decided to resubmit the ethics application ‘using standard academic conventions’ (2019, 9).

These examples suggest that the meanings for both failure and success are neither fixed nor singular, nor are they universally shared. In contexts like Canada, where there is a history of eroding social safety nets, settler colonialism and many other systemic inequities, there is a real risk of doing further damage when we attempt to normalise failures without addressing the reality that ‘failure affects people differently, and that privilege plays an important role in who is allowed to fail – and who isn’t’ (Hallmark 2018, para 1).

Equally important are questions that open up notions of success to examine their normative underpinnings. Talking about failure in ways that focus only on failure’s transmutation (for example, we all fail sometimes, what matters is that we’ve transformed failure into something triumphant or otherwise ‘good’) does nothing to open failure up if we leave other problematic premises intact. Thus, we would do well to question the premise that transforming failure into something synonymous with success is or ought to be the goal. Similarly, we would also do well to question assumptions that pin success and its consequences down as desirable, positive and good for us – much like the ‘cruel optimism’ Lauren Berlant (2011) uses as a term to gesture at the ways in which definitions of success are entwined with the status quo, and both success and the status quo are portrayed as a state that is attainable, desirable and obligatory.

Beyond failure-as-usual, or what to do with failure

Failure’s potential for disruption, critique and transformation is frequently undermined by narratives that depoliticise failure, treating it as an individualised experience rather than a product of structural inequalities. Without situating failure within its broader social and political contexts, efforts to normalise failure risk reinforcing the very systems they attempt to challenge.

Many scholars have emphasised the importance of ‘failing failure’ as a way to open up alternatives to oppressive templates of success (Burford 2017; Cvetkovich 2012; Halberstam 2011; O’Gorman and Werry 2012). This framing urges us to see failure as an opportunity for critique, a point of entry into examining the power structures and normative discourses that shape our lives (Gross and Alexander 2016). By moving away from ideologies rooted in individualism, competition and privatisation, failure can become a generative space where we challenge inequitable systems and confront the role we may play in perpetuating them.

Future directions for engaging with failure might involve focusing on failure beyond-the-usual – an understanding of failure that goes beyond personal responsibility narratives and delves into systemic critique (see Chapters 13 and 17, this volume). In educational contexts, for example, this might entail a care-full approach to failure that acknowledges how students’ lived experiences shape their relationship with and understanding of failure and success. It might also involve tailoring course policies to explicitly communicate why failure is okay in specific, situated terms (Feigenbaum 2021a). Key to these approaches is their resistance to universalising failure, or framing it as a stepping stone to individual success. This includes examining how failure can be used to dismantle the ideologies of meritocracy and cruel optimism (Berlant 2011) that tie success to the status quo, and as an entry point for collective action, solidarity and the development of equitable alternatives.

Ultimately, by contextualising failure and interrogating its relation to success, we can better engage with its emancipatory potential – its capacity to inspire not only reflection but transformation. Failure, then, becomes less about individual shortcomings and more about a collective opportunity to confront and renovate the systems that structure our lives in order to redistribute resources and possibilities.

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