Marquis Bey
Director of Graduate Studies | Affiliated Faculty, Professor in Black Studies & English
B.A. in English, American Studies and Philosophy, Lebanon Valley College, 2014
- marquis.bey@northwestern.edu
- Website
- Crowe Hall 5-103
Research Interests:
- Black Feminist Theorizing
- Transgender Studies
- Critical Theory
Marquis Bey's (they/them, or any pronoun)* work focuses on blackness and fugitivity, transness, and black feminist theory. Bey is particularly concerned with modes of subjectivity that index otherwise ways of being, utilizing blackness and transness—as fugitive, extra-ontological postures—as names for such otherwise subjectivities. These two analytics (rather than endowments of the epidermis or specific bodily morphologies) are the axes around which Bey thinks about subjectivity formation and deformation, abolition, and political work.
Bey's most recent publication is a brief monograph with University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunners series, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender, which deeply meditates on Nahum Chandler’s work, putting into conversation his thinking on paraontology and desedimentation with the transness and gender nonnormativity of transgender studies. Currently, Bey is at work on multiple projects. Forthcoming with Duke University Press is Bey’s monograph Black Trans Feminism, which attempts to theorize the convergence of blackness, transness, and black feminism via the Black Radical Tradition, critical theory, and contemporary literature. As well, Bey is in the process of revising a collection of autotheory essays meditating on the relationship between blackness and the category of cisgender, tentatively entitled Cistem Failure.
*Note on pronouns: The “preference” for they/them pronouns to describe myself is an attempt to mark my irreverence toward the gender binary, and to mark my tentative and always-in-process relationship to gender nonbinariness. Put differently, this is not to say I “am” nonbinary but, more pointedly, seek a nonbinaristic relationship to my own understanding of my gender—an attempted unrelation to gender, as it were. Thus, it matters less what pronoun one uses for me; I am, ultimately, pronoun indifferent. That capaciousness is simply another attempt to express an irreverence and disdain for the gender binary and the ways it might inhere in pronouns.
Selected Publications:
- Black Trans Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (Forthcoming, January 2022)
- The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. 2020
- “Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel Dolezal and Your Face in Mine.” CR: the New Centennial Review. 2020.
- “Trouble Genders: ‘LGBT’ Collapse and Trans Fundamentality.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy. 2021
- Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020.
- Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2019.
- “Black Fugitivity Un/gendered.” The Black Scholar 49, no. 1 (2019).
- “Other Ways to Be: Trans.” Women and Language 41, no. 1 (2018).
- Co-authored with Kai M. Green. “Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet: A Conversation.” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 19, no. 4 (2017).
- “The Trans*-Ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-Ness.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017).
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