There has been recently a growing interest in studying the processes of destabilisation of markets, or in other terms their misfires or failure (Butler, 2010; Callon, 2014; Roscoe and Loza, 2019). Failure as an opportunity to destabilise and reorganise markets and consumption has been explored in contexts such as the study of market-based interventions in electronic waste (Neyland et al., 2019), market ideology effects on policy interventions (Ossandon and Ureta, 2019), the (re)organization of biosocial communities in the preventative market for breast cancer (Cheded, Liu and Hopkinson, 2021), the normalisation of spatial segregation and branding in the consumption of gated communities (Chaudhuri and Jagadale, 2021), and licensing practices in the market for HIV/AIDS medicines (Geiger and Gross, 2018). This scholarship has highlighted the importance of not only studying the processes of stabilisation of markets, but also their destabilisation/or misfires.
This paper extends this body of work by drawing on writing from queer theory, and more particularly ‘queer failure’ (Halberstam, 2011; Kjeldgaard et al., 2021), to explore market failure as an important device to oppose dominant regimes of thought and an opportunity to re-organise. I utilise the case of the market for gene editing to illustrate my argument, by looking at how fictional and organisational narratives interact, collide and feed into each other in the attempt to ‘make’ a market for gene editing. I particularly focus on the narratives of expectation and fear of the market for gene editing – materialised by the ‘disease-free’ individual and the ‘mutated’ individual. In my study of the market for gene editing, I consider undoing as a necessary part of the doing of markets. This paves the way for the analysis of possibilities of failure in the initial process of the doing, as well as things-could-have-been-otherwise alternative narratives.
References:
Butler, J. (2010). Performative agency, Journal of Cultural Economy, 3(2): 147-161.
Calon, M. (2014). Performativity, misfires and politics. In Cochoy, F., Giraudeau, M., and McFall, L. (eds.), The limits of performativity: Politics of the modern economy, New York: Routledge, pp. 25-31
Chaudhuri, H.R. and Jagadale, S.R. (2021). Normalized heterotopia as a market failure in a spatial marketing system: The case of gated communities in India, Journal of Macromarketing, 41(2): 297-314.
Cheded, M., Liu, C. and Hopkinson, G. (2021). Dead metaphors and responsibilised bodies-in-transition: The implications of medical metaphors for understanding the consumption of preventative healthcare. Journal of Marketing Management. DOI: 10.1080/0267257X.2021.1996442.
Geiger, S. and Gross, N. (2018). Market failures and market framings: Can a market be transformed from the inside? Organization Studies, 39(10): 1357-1376.
Halberstam, J (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Kjeldgaard, D., Nøjdaard, M., Hartmann, B.J., Bode, M., Lindberg, F., Mossberg, L. and Östberg, J. (2021). Failure: Perspectives and prospects in marketing and consumption theory, Marketing Theory, 21(2): 277-286.
Neyland, D., Ehrenstein, V. and Milyaeva, S. (2019). On the difficulties of addressing collective concerns through markets: from market devices to accountability devices. Economy and Society, 48(2): 243-267.
Ossandón, J. and Ureta, S. (2019). Problematizing markets: market failures and the government of collective concerns. Economy and Society, 48(2): 175-196.
Roscoe, P. and Loza, O. (2019). The -ography of markets (or, the responsibilities of market studies), Journal of Cultural Economy, 12(3): 215-227.