Allison D. Carr - Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail

CHRIS HAY

For a horrible moment, we thought wed failed. The Chief Statistician for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, David Kalisch, had taken four minutes and six seconds to get to this point, before declaring:

And now the official results of the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey. For the national result, Yes responses: seven million, eight hundred and seventeen thousand, and two hundred and forty seven votes

A pause, filled by the inaudible sound of queer activists stomachs simultaneously dropping around the country. It didnt sound like enoughthe Postal Survey had been voluntary, and while the total response figure had been reported earlier in Kalischs speech, this was no time to rely on mental mathematics. He continued, representing sixty-one point six per cent of clear responses. That is, 61.6% of clear responses were yes. He kept talking, but none of us heard: a colleague was banging against the wall that separated our offices in triumph; the students gathered below our windows were roaring. Marriage equality was finally on its way to becoming the law of the land.

The bland, procedural name of the instrument belied the seriousness of the stakes: For better or worse, the Marriage Law Postal Survey represented the culmination of years of activism towards marriage equality, and a loss in the popular vote would have taken the cause off Australias legislative agenda for the foreseeable xi |, 262).

For many queer folk and our allies, merely participating in the Postal Survey was a loaded choice, given the effrontery of the government outsourcing its legislative responsibilities to the electorate, and in so doing inviting the populace to participate in months of debate about our humanity (Shaw ). We queers are practised failures, and no strangers to staying outside the system to question its legitimacy. In contesting Kirbys resignation to failure, others asked questions similar to those posed by Jeanette Lehn in this volume: Who pays for failures, and, if any insight is gained, who is set up to gain from that transaction? The boycott movement forced us to confront a question that drives Shari Stenberg and Stacey Waites chapter: What options for resistance exist? In the end, there were very few such options: With teeth gritted to ward off failure, we joined the yes campaign (and, for what it is worth, eventually Kirby did too).

For every success during the campaign period, there had been a failure. For every heart-warming social media video of a campaigner coming out to a family member who then reassures them of their yes, a young person self-harmed in the wake of the publicly funded campaigns that clogged the airwaves (see Verrelli et al. , 268).