Marquis Bey

About

Marquis Bey is a Professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University. They hold a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University (2019) and a B.A. in English, American Studies, and Philosophy from Lebanon Valley College (2014). Bey's work focuses on thinking of blackness as 'paraontological,' which they utilize to explore questions of nonnormative subjectivity through race, gender, and personhood. Their scholarship employs black feminist theory, trans and nonbinary studies, and abolitionist theory to articulate a project of black trans feminism that challenges normative constraints such as white supremacy, cisnormativity, and heteropatriarchy, as well as categories of race and gender. Bey is the author of 'Black Trans Feminism' and 'Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender,' both published by Duke University Press in 2022, and is working on a three-volume collection of critical essays on 'jailbreaking' gender, race, and class. They prefer they/them pronouns as an expression of their irreverence toward the gender binary and their ongoing relationship with gender nonbinariness.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Epistemology
• History
• Gender studies
• Law
• Art

Selected publications

• Black trans feminism

  Duke University Press eBooks · 2022 · 193 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  "Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each, conceiving of black trans feminism as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power."--

  PublisherDOI

• Thinking with Trans Now

  Social Text · 2020 · 69 citations

  This roundtable considers trans theory’s status as a site of thinking racialization, empire, political economy, and materiality in the current historical, institutional, and political moment. We ask, what does it mean to think trans in a time of crisis?, and what is the place of critique in a crisis?, acknowledging that global crises are not insulated from trans, and trans is not insulated from the world. This roundtable looks to materialist formations to think trans now, including a new materia…

  PublisherDOI

• Cutting Up Words

  TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly · 2020 · 32 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article argues that Kathy Acker articulates an understanding of transness through language. More than a meditation on gender-nonnormative characters in Acker's work, the article dwells on how Acker uses language as a vector through which to imply the residue of a certain understanding of trans. In short, examined here is Acker as a trans philosophical thinker, one whose thinking manifested in how she uses language.

  PublisherDOI

• RE: [No Subject]—On Nonbinary Gender

  Qui Parle · 2021-12-01 · 20 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This essay attempts to imagine what nonbinary gender might be through an autotheoretical and imaginative email exchange between the author, as “X,” and the author’s gender as nonbinary. Indeed, theorized conversationally throughout are the difficulties and potentialities of nonbinary gender, or nonbinariness as a refusal of gender.

  PublisherDOI

• NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary

  Women's studies quarterly · 2023-09-01 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary Marquis Bey (bio) The aim here is not to give an incessantly clear definition of nonbinariness, such that we would then have an "accurate" or "correct" definition. Indeed, this impulse—to clarify pristinely, to excavate etymological roots in order for a term to be illuminated once and for all, obviating misuse—is one I have long had, and I feel its tugs now. But that will not save nonbinariness from misuse or misunderstanding. There is in fact so…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eliza Steinbock

  Maastricht University

  2 shared

• Jack Halberstam

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Susan Stryker

  2 shared

• Karma Lochrie

  Indiana University Bloomington

  1 shared

• Ruth Evans

  1 shared

• Joan Burgwinkle

  1 shared

• Sascha Crasnow

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared

• Theodora Sakellarides

  1 shared

Similar researchers at Northwestern University

• Martha Biondih-6