Queered Failure and Management Education

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the idea of queering U.K. management education by focusing on failure. Drawing from Halberstam’s writing on the queer art of failure, the chapter argues that management education can variously reproduce heteronormativity, entrenching the gender and sexual binaries that sustain it. Furthermore, management education can be understood as a process of organizing LGBT+ sexualities whereby desirable normalized LGBT+ subjects are constituted. A notion of queered failure can occasion opportunities for exposing and problematizing the discursive constitution of desirable LGBT+ subjects that relies on othering nonnormative sexual subjects. Reflecting on an example of failing to fail queerly in the management classroom, the chapter contextualizes queered failure in the practices of queer pedagogy, wherein insights are provided into how diversity management approaches to LGBT+ workplace topics can reproduce heteronormativity. This chapter underscores the fruitfulness of focusing on queered notions of how LGBT+ subjects often fail heteronormativity.