Marquis Bey
Marquis Bey (they/them, or any pronoun) completed a PhD in English at Cornell University in May 2019 and is Professor of Black Studies and English, core faculty and advisory board member of Gender & Sexuality Studies, and core faculty member of Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Bey's work, broadly speaking, concerns Black Feminist Theorizing, Transgender Studies, Critical Theory, and Contemporary African American Literature. Bey is the author of Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism (U of Arizona Press, 2019) and Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism (AK Press, 2020), and The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (U of Minnesota Press, 2020).
Bey's field-defining academic monograph, Black Trans Feminism, is published with Duke University Press (2022). Black Trans Feminism theorizes black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, which are precipitated by an understanding of blackness, transness, and (black) feminism as interested not in selective reform or gender proliferation but in wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given. Via an examination of theoretical discourses in black studies, transgender studies, and feminist theory; the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, Venus Selenite; and what it would mean to live with hope in the world black trans feministically, Bey delivers an unparalleled articulation of radical theorizing and politics.
Most recently, Bey finished a collection of autotheory essays on blackness and cisgender, titled Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Duke University Press, August 2022).
Visit their website for more information: marquisbey.com
Bey's field-defining academic monograph, Black Trans Feminism, is published with Duke University Press (2022). Black Trans Feminism theorizes black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, which are precipitated by an understanding of blackness, transness, and (black) feminism as interested not in selective reform or gender proliferation but in wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given. Via an examination of theoretical discourses in black studies, transgender studies, and feminist theory; the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, Venus Selenite; and what it would mean to live with hope in the world black trans feministically, Bey delivers an unparalleled articulation of radical theorizing and politics.
Most recently, Bey finished a collection of autotheory essays on blackness and cisgender, titled Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Duke University Press, August 2022).
Visit their website for more information: marquisbey.com
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Books by Marquis Bey
In this bold and expansive treatise, Marquis Bey seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism—not by listing “all the Black people who are anarchists and the anarchists who are Black people,” but through a fluid and generative encounter between anarchism and Blackness.
Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Skeptical of the usual finger-pointing this lack invites, Bey addresses it head on, not by constructing a new canon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of a Black feminist and transgender theory that unsettles and subverts social hierarchies, Bey explores what we can learn by making the kinship of Blackness and anarchism explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter.
As Bey frames it, if the state is predicated on a racialized and gendered capitalism, its undoing can only be imagined and undertaken by a political theory that takes race and gender seriously, a theory of anarcho-Blackness.
Articles by Marquis Bey
Features Aren Aizura, Treva Ellison, Jules Gill-Peterson, Toby Beauchamp, and Eliza Steinbock.
This essay thinks through the nonbinary pronoun "they" and its proximity to black vernacular usages of the word as a descriptor of a certain kind of openness to subjectivity. This tendency is brought into conversation with gender nonbinary thinking around they pronouns. In other words, there is something to the pervasive usage of "they" (e.g. "How ya mama and them?" "Where they do that at?") that speaks to the presence of (gender) nonbinarism as intimate with a notion of blackness.
Find here: https://oxfordaasc.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref-9780195301731-e-78550
This paper seeks to bring trans/feminist epistemologies to bear on theorizations of Blackness as proximal to fugitivity. Transing is an interrogative and disorienting analytic that happens in the loosening of intelligible genders. In short, transing is a fugitive modality, an un/gendering: what I call, melding Hortense Spillers, Kai M. Green, and Treva Ellison, "traniflesh." Such an understanding of transing reveals its constitutivity in fugitivity. My aim, then, is to show that traniflesh emerges as an impossibly possible space where we know not what will arise because, illegible to us on variegated levels, it does not rely on legibilizing relations to Man and the categorizing hegemon. As an emergent force and "capacitating structure for alternative modes of being," traniflesh does and becomes in the terrain that skirts captivity where different formations and matterings, different and differing subjectivities, of life can materialize. Traniflesh, flesh that is trans to gender, that irrupts into and out of the refusitive force of Blackness, is a fugitive un/gendering
This essay argues for a productive alliance between trans feminism, trans studies, and black feminist thought (BFT) to articulate a black feminist mode of activism that takes seriously the epistemologies of black trans women. Ultimately this essay critiques BFT's cisgender normativity and offers a more inclusive imagining of BFT, referred to as blacktransfeminist thought (BTFT). To illustrate the scholarly significance of BTFT, I draw upon the ontological invalidation of black trans lives in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. #BlackLivesMatter is situated as (1) an exemplar of how black transgender women are commonly excluded from activist discourses, and (2) an opportunity to theorize the utility of BTFT as it relates to racialized gender variant lives and deaths.
Copyright: This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.1, winter 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.
In this bold and expansive treatise, Marquis Bey seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism—not by listing “all the Black people who are anarchists and the anarchists who are Black people,” but through a fluid and generative encounter between anarchism and Blackness.
Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Skeptical of the usual finger-pointing this lack invites, Bey addresses it head on, not by constructing a new canon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of a Black feminist and transgender theory that unsettles and subverts social hierarchies, Bey explores what we can learn by making the kinship of Blackness and anarchism explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter.
As Bey frames it, if the state is predicated on a racialized and gendered capitalism, its undoing can only be imagined and undertaken by a political theory that takes race and gender seriously, a theory of anarcho-Blackness.
Features Aren Aizura, Treva Ellison, Jules Gill-Peterson, Toby Beauchamp, and Eliza Steinbock.
This essay thinks through the nonbinary pronoun "they" and its proximity to black vernacular usages of the word as a descriptor of a certain kind of openness to subjectivity. This tendency is brought into conversation with gender nonbinary thinking around they pronouns. In other words, there is something to the pervasive usage of "they" (e.g. "How ya mama and them?" "Where they do that at?") that speaks to the presence of (gender) nonbinarism as intimate with a notion of blackness.
Find here: https://oxfordaasc.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref-9780195301731-e-78550
This paper seeks to bring trans/feminist epistemologies to bear on theorizations of Blackness as proximal to fugitivity. Transing is an interrogative and disorienting analytic that happens in the loosening of intelligible genders. In short, transing is a fugitive modality, an un/gendering: what I call, melding Hortense Spillers, Kai M. Green, and Treva Ellison, "traniflesh." Such an understanding of transing reveals its constitutivity in fugitivity. My aim, then, is to show that traniflesh emerges as an impossibly possible space where we know not what will arise because, illegible to us on variegated levels, it does not rely on legibilizing relations to Man and the categorizing hegemon. As an emergent force and "capacitating structure for alternative modes of being," traniflesh does and becomes in the terrain that skirts captivity where different formations and matterings, different and differing subjectivities, of life can materialize. Traniflesh, flesh that is trans to gender, that irrupts into and out of the refusitive force of Blackness, is a fugitive un/gendering
This essay argues for a productive alliance between trans feminism, trans studies, and black feminist thought (BFT) to articulate a black feminist mode of activism that takes seriously the epistemologies of black trans women. Ultimately this essay critiques BFT's cisgender normativity and offers a more inclusive imagining of BFT, referred to as blacktransfeminist thought (BTFT). To illustrate the scholarly significance of BTFT, I draw upon the ontological invalidation of black trans lives in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. #BlackLivesMatter is situated as (1) an exemplar of how black transgender women are commonly excluded from activist discourses, and (2) an opportunity to theorize the utility of BTFT as it relates to racialized gender variant lives and deaths.
Copyright: This work originally appeared in CR: The New Centennial Review 18.1, winter 2018, published by Michigan State University Press.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE A COPY OF THE ARTICLE, EMAIL ME AT mb2444 [at] cornell.edu
The essay takes as its focus Rachel Dolezal, a woman born white who spent nearly ten years identifying as Black until “outed” by her parents. While Dolezal’s obfuscation of her natal white identity is rightly interrogated, we part from popular claims of Dolezal’s ersatz Black racial identity, or her utter inability to be Black. Instead, this essay concerns itself not with whether Dolezal is or can be Black, but when and where was she Black. We are concerned with what Dolezal’s situation says about the volatility and fugitivity of Blackness. Broken into four sections, the essay reconceptualizes Blackness as fugitivity, a “quotidian practice of refusal,” as Tina Campt says; recasts Blackness as a when and where rather than a what; highlights the performativity of racial identity; and speaks to the tension and overlap between transgendered identities and transracial identities