Three ways of knowing failure

This paper brings together two different ways of knowing failure, with a view to offering epistemological, methodological and ontological resources for undertaking feminist research. The idea behind ‘two ways of knowing failure’ is to make a point about the kinds of knowledge, data, and methods that are legitimate and valued in the research assemblage, while showing how a feminist ethnographic position can leave one vulnerable to feeling your whole person is a failure if parts of one’s research do not work. On face value, readers could be excused for thinking this research experience really does not matter: who cares if I feel like a failure? Especially when all the experiences of failure end up creating a portfolio of successful ethnographic work? I maintain that recognition of the complexity of the research assemblage and the gendered nature of the research assemblage does matter in terms of supporting the work of emerging feminist ethnographers, who surely have similar experiences of feeling like a failure, experiences that are not necessarily echoed in the existing literature on methods and failure. Another way of saying this is that I am going on record talking about research failure so that women who fail in aspects of ethnographic research methods can understand their failure as normal, as something others have experienced, and perhaps as a step to success. Failure and success are enmeshed, although experiences of failure do not make this clear. Through putting academic and esteemed ‘theories of failure’ alongside first person, methodological experiences of failure in fieldwork, I mean to suggest that it is popularly seen as acceptable within social research assemblages to write about the political significance of failure (see, for example, Halberstam 2011), but not to actually do fieldwork that fails. Doing fieldwork that fails is somehow taboo, despite the gains made towards appreciating the political significance of failure in queer and disability theory.