Marquis Bey
Biographic Data
| ID | 3589655 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Marquis Bey |
| GIVEN NAMES | Marquis |
| FAMILY NAME | Bey |
| SIGNATURE | BEY M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 104 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Anonymous genders
We Must Abolish the Conditions of the Unbearable: A Conversation with Marquis Bey
This article is structured as a conversation between scholars Jess A. Goldberg and Marquis Bey, grounded in the arguments of Bey's recent book Black Trans Feminism , published in 2022 by Duke University Press. Rather than an overview or summary of Bey's book, the conversation digs into particular dimensions of Bey's arguments and analyses. It begins by situating Black Trans Feminism in relation to the topic of the special issue of WSQ in which th…
Playing and Hiding Joyfully in the Rubble
Marquis Bey's Black Trans Feminism (2022) puts forth radical gender abolition as the necessary actualization of blackness and transness toward hopeful world de/construction. An intentional, ongoing work of stepping aside from expected regimes replaces material identitary stances and aims to embrace possibility rather than hold us down. The present conversational piece, fostering critical reflection in/on kinship and interested in evading discipli…
All My Friends Are Trans (or Will Be Soon)
This essay makes the case that the author's friends, all of them, are or are becoming trans. Not in a way that indexes a medico-juridical demographic, but in the sense that trans as a mode of living is the grounds on which the author forges relationality. Thus it is no surprise that time and again, friends the author has long had keep consistently shifting their identifications, moving more radically in unrelation to gender, becoming, in a word, …
Anybody, Everybody, All the Time
In this conversation, Andrew Cutrone and Marquis Bey discuss Bey's recent monograph, Black Trans Feminism (2022) in the context of citation practices, black and trans feminist practice and theory, “radical-radical thinking,” and fugitivity
NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary
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 fr…
Introduction: Abolition Politics
We hear the word uttered in streets, on signs, in think pieces.We see it used as an analytic through which to understand how the radical among us seek to initiate change.It is on the cover of books and in course titles.It is a politic, a modality of living and relating, a call, a demand, an invitation, a wish.Abolition.With such an increase in its utterance, it grows more and more imperative that we come to a clearer understanding of what aboliti…
Asking the question of it: Trans/Gender Object Lessons
This article queries the very question of and that is 'gender', from the vantage of transgender studies. In other words, it moves through Wiegman's question of the desires that propel us and asks what desires propel a feeling of gender's necessity, positing the possibility of relinquishing gender as a vector with the same kind of footing it currently has. In short, the question that is asked is gender itself, and the question is asked from a tran…
Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender
In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a…
Trans visibility and trans viability: A Roundtable
This Roundtable is crafted from the online event held on Saturday 20 November 2021 on Trans Visual Cultures. That event was organized to celebrate the recently published themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture on new work in transgender art and visual cultures, guest edited by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg, and suggested for the journal by Jill H Casid. The themed issue emerged from a session run at the College Art Association in New York…
Black Trans Feminism
In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an e…
All In
A T I O N , which is more like a philosophical encomium articulated through critical trans theorizing, as it were, engendered immense timidity.Timidity, yes, because of something much grander than what is referred to as imposter syndrome.I am among thinkers who have edified me from afar, thinkers who are quite deeply responsible for the modalities through which I think.To wit, I have, in the hallway of my apartment-a high-ceilinged abode in Chica…
Queer as in Abolition Now
Queer as in Abolition Now!" introduces the special issue "Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition." The issue brings together scholars, artists, and writers working at the intersections of queer theory, critical race studies, and radical activist movements to consider prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the co…
Re: [No Subject]—On Nonbinary Gender
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
Trouble Genders: “LGBT” Collapse and Trans Fundamentality
This essay considers how deployments of the acronym “LGBT” often obscure and flatten the specificity of the terms the letters reference. Also of concern here is how the “T” might be the more fundamental letter, as reactions to “LGBT identity” are indexed in gender transgression, to which the “T” refers. I argue for holding the trouble of the acronym in the “T” and that the trans underlies how “LGBT,” as a marker of subjectivity or violence, becom…
The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender
A deep meditation on and expansion of the figure of the Negro and insurrectionary effects of the â Xâ as theorized by Nahum Chandler, *The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender* thinks through the problematizing effects of blackness as, too, a problematizing of gender. Through the paraontological, the between, and the figure of the â Xâ (with its explicit contemporary link to nonbinary and trans genders) Marquis Bey presents a meditation o…
The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender
Thinking with Trans Now
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 form…
Cutting Up Words
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
I Brought You Into This Word, and I'll Take You Out: Black Feminist WomanWord in Shay Youngblood's Soul Kiss
This article theorizes what might be called "womanWord," following Eleanor W. Traylor, through Shay Youngblood's 1997 novel Soul Kiss. Insofar as the novel demonstrates an inextricability between black women's subjectivity and language, and insofar as Traylor's "womanword" expresses a linguistic encounter integral to subject formation, this article articulates a fundamentally black feminist womanWord that advances the crucial ways black feminist …
Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts-Rachel Dolezal and Your Face in Mine
Research Article| July 01 2020 Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel Dolezal and Your Face in Mine Marquis Bey Marquis Bey Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Marquis Bey is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Bey's work concerns black feminist theorizing, transgender studies, critical theory, and contemporary African American literature. Bey is…
Black Fugitivity Un/Gendered
A way outa no way is flesh outa flesh.—Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Oughta Be a Woman”Blackness and transness, and their constitutive queerness, as analytic modalities—skirtingly and tangentially rela
Pitch Black, Black Pitch: Theorizing African American Literature
These elements of social modality come to bear on the historical situation of the text, the writer, and various constituent reader-groups that "choose" the text, but I mean historical situatedness primarily as the enunciative conditions that surround a particular act of speaking/writing and the textual densities ("writings" that precede) flowing back against it. In that regard, African American fictional texts declare, by definition, a subversive…
Fugitive Hope: The Constitutive Life in Black Elegies
Fugitive HopeThe Constitutive Life in Black Elegies Marquis Bey (bio) come celebratewith me that everydaysomething has tried to kill meand has failed. —Lucille Clifton, "Won't you celebrate with me" The Blackness of the Elegiac Call When attempting to find a way to navigate sociality, to navigate a Heideggerian being-in-the-world that might be more accurately reconfigured as a becoming-in (excess of)-the-world, there must be something that engend…
Beyoncé's Black (Ab)Normal: Baaad Insurgency and the Queerness of Slaying
This essay advances from Erica Edwards' theorization of "sex after the black normal" to understand the confined insurgency of Beyoncé's racial and gender lyricality. That is, Beyoncé is situated within the "Black normal," but, while amid its tempered normality, she fissures its purported seamlessness. What this essay seeks to do is demonstrate Beyoncé's insurgency within the Black normal. Using her early solo album, Dangerously in Love (2003), as…
The Trans*-ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-ness
The essay thinks radically differently about the concepts of black and trans*. Trans* and black thus denote poetic, para-ontological forces that are only tangentially, and ultimately arbitrarily, related to bodies said to be black or transgender. That is to say, they are differently inflected names for an anoriginal lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a besidedness to ontology. Manifesting in the modern world differently as race…
Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet: A Conversation
This conversation meditates on the ways in which Black Feminism and Trans Feminism relate to one another, how they speak to and supplement one another, and how they are in fact constitutive. Considering that Black feminism, historically, has attempted to interrogate the capaciousness of the very term “woman” and to gender, if you will, an androcentric “Blackness,” one might say, as Che Gossett has said, that Black feminism is “always already tran…
NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary
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 fr…
Queer as in Abolition Now
Queer as in Abolition Now!" introduces the special issue "Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition." The issue brings together scholars, artists, and writers working at the intersections of queer theory, critical race studies, and radical activist movements to consider prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the co…
When We Enter: The Blackness of Rachel Dolezal
“You won’t read my telling. You read the world but not the letters of talk. You don’t know how to. Maybe one day you will learn.”1—Toni Morrison, A Mercy “ ... when and where [do] I enter ... [?]”2—Ann
Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts-Rachel Dolezal and Your Face in Mine
Research Article| July 01 2020 Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel Dolezal and Your Face in Mine Marquis Bey Marquis Bey Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Marquis Bey is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Bey's work concerns black feminist theorizing, transgender studies, critical theory, and contemporary African American literature. Bey is…
Black Fugitivity Un/Gendered
A way outa no way is flesh outa flesh.—Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Oughta Be a Woman”Blackness and transness, and their constitutive queerness, as analytic modalities—skirtingly and tangentially rela
Pitch Black, Black Pitch: Theorizing African American Literature
These elements of social modality come to bear on the historical situation of the text, the writer, and various constituent reader-groups that "choose" the text, but I mean historical situatedness primarily as the enunciative conditions that surround a particular act of speaking/writing and the textual densities ("writings" that precede) flowing back against it. In that regard, African American fictional texts declare, by definition, a subversive…
Trouble Genders: “LGBT” Collapse and Trans Fundamentality
This essay considers how deployments of the acronym “LGBT” often obscure and flatten the specificity of the terms the letters reference. Also of concern here is how the “T” might be the more fundamental letter, as reactions to “LGBT identity” are indexed in gender transgression, to which the “T” refers. I argue for holding the trouble of the acronym in the “T” and that the trans underlies how “LGBT,” as a marker of subjectivity or violence, becom…
Anonymous genders
All In
A T I O N , which is more like a philosophical encomium articulated through critical trans theorizing, as it were, engendered immense timidity.Timidity, yes, because of something much grander than what is referred to as imposter syndrome.I am among thinkers who have edified me from afar, thinkers who are quite deeply responsible for the modalities through which I think.To wit, I have, in the hallway of my apartment-a high-ceilinged abode in Chica…
Cutting Up Words
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
Fugitive Hope: The Constitutive Life in Black Elegies
Fugitive HopeThe Constitutive Life in Black Elegies Marquis Bey (bio) come celebratewith me that everydaysomething has tried to kill meand has failed. —Lucille Clifton, "Won't you celebrate with me" The Blackness of the Elegiac Call When attempting to find a way to navigate sociality, to navigate a Heideggerian being-in-the-world that might be more accurately reconfigured as a becoming-in (excess of)-the-world, there must be something that engend…
Bring Out Your Dead: Understanding the Historical Persistence of the Criminalization of Black Bodies
This essay speaks to the criminalization of Black bodies via the purported 'confession' of wrongdoing that Blackness makes through the interpretive White gaze. Blackness operates as a site of always imminently actualized criminality or pathology that must be quelled or eradicated. Using James Baldwin's meditation on the function of Wayne Williams's body as a historical anchor, this essay seks to articulate the contemporary ways in which Black bod…
Epistemology of Ink: An Unholy Trinity; or, Atheism, Feminism and Blackness
Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama by Stephanie Li
Reviewed by: Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama by Stephanie Li Marquis Bey (bio) Li, Stephanie. Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2012. In Signifying without Specifying Stephanie Li illustrates to readers the unique contemporary use of racial language employed by American politicians and writers. This language, she says, is what Toni Morrison has calle…
The Shape of Angels' Teeth
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 on…
When We Enter: The Blackness of Rachel Dolezal
“You won’t read my telling. You read the world but not the letters of talk. You don’t know how to. Maybe one day you will learn.”1—Toni Morrison, A Mercy “ ... when and where [do] I enter ... [?]”2—Ann
Bring Out Your Dead: Understanding the Historical Persistence of the Criminalization of Black Bodies
This essay speaks to the criminalization of Black bodies via the purported 'confession' of wrongdoing that Blackness makes through the interpretive White gaze. Blackness operates as a site of always imminently actualized criminality or pathology that must be quelled or eradicated. Using James Baldwin's meditation on the function of Wayne Williams's body as a historical anchor, this essay seks to articulate the contemporary ways in which Black bod…
Beyoncé's Black (Ab)Normal: Baaad Insurgency and the Queerness of Slaying
This essay advances from Erica Edwards' theorization of "sex after the black normal" to understand the confined insurgency of Beyoncé's racial and gender lyricality. That is, Beyoncé is situated within the "Black normal," but, while amid its tempered normality, she fissures its purported seamlessness. What this essay seeks to do is demonstrate Beyoncé's insurgency within the Black normal. Using her early solo album, Dangerously in Love (2003), as…
The Trans*-ness of Blackness, the Blackness of Trans*-ness
The essay thinks radically differently about the concepts of black and trans*. Trans* and black thus denote poetic, para-ontological forces that are only tangentially, and ultimately arbitrarily, related to bodies said to be black or transgender. That is to say, they are differently inflected names for an anoriginal lawlessness that marks an escape from confinement and a besidedness to ontology. Manifesting in the modern world differently as race…
Where Black Feminist Thought and Trans* Feminism Meet: A Conversation
This conversation meditates on the ways in which Black Feminism and Trans Feminism relate to one another, how they speak to and supplement one another, and how they are in fact constitutive. Considering that Black feminism, historically, has attempted to interrogate the capaciousness of the very term “woman” and to gender, if you will, an androcentric “Blackness,” one might say, as Che Gossett has said, that Black feminism is “always already tran…
Pitch Black, Black Pitch: Theorizing African American Literature
These elements of social modality come to bear on the historical situation of the text, the writer, and various constituent reader-groups that "choose" the text, but I mean historical situatedness primarily as the enunciative conditions that surround a particular act of speaking/writing and the textual densities ("writings" that precede) flowing back against it. In that regard, African American fictional texts declare, by definition, a subversive…
Fugitive Hope: The Constitutive Life in Black Elegies
Fugitive HopeThe Constitutive Life in Black Elegies Marquis Bey (bio) come celebratewith me that everydaysomething has tried to kill meand has failed. —Lucille Clifton, "Won't you celebrate with me" The Blackness of the Elegiac Call When attempting to find a way to navigate sociality, to navigate a Heideggerian being-in-the-world that might be more accurately reconfigured as a becoming-in (excess of)-the-world, there must be something that engend…
Black Fugitivity Un/Gendered
A way outa no way is flesh outa flesh.—Sweet Honey in the Rock, “Oughta Be a Woman”Blackness and transness, and their constitutive queerness, as analytic modalities—skirtingly and tangentially rela
The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender
A deep meditation on and expansion of the figure of the Negro and insurrectionary effects of the â Xâ as theorized by Nahum Chandler, *The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender* thinks through the problematizing effects of blackness as, too, a problematizing of gender. Through the paraontological, the between, and the figure of the â Xâ (with its explicit contemporary link to nonbinary and trans genders) Marquis Bey presents a meditation o…
The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender
Thinking with Trans Now
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 form…
Cutting Up Words
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
I Brought You Into This Word, and I'll Take You Out: Black Feminist WomanWord in Shay Youngblood's Soul Kiss
This article theorizes what might be called "womanWord," following Eleanor W. Traylor, through Shay Youngblood's 1997 novel Soul Kiss. Insofar as the novel demonstrates an inextricability between black women's subjectivity and language, and insofar as Traylor's "womanword" expresses a linguistic encounter integral to subject formation, this article articulates a fundamentally black feminist womanWord that advances the crucial ways black feminist …
Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts-Rachel Dolezal and Your Face in Mine
Research Article| July 01 2020 Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel Dolezal and Your Face in Mine Marquis Bey Marquis Bey Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois Marquis Bey is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Bey's work concerns black feminist theorizing, transgender studies, critical theory, and contemporary African American literature. Bey is…
Re: [No Subject]—On Nonbinary Gender
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
Trouble Genders: “LGBT” Collapse and Trans Fundamentality
This essay considers how deployments of the acronym “LGBT” often obscure and flatten the specificity of the terms the letters reference. Also of concern here is how the “T” might be the more fundamental letter, as reactions to “LGBT identity” are indexed in gender transgression, to which the “T” refers. I argue for holding the trouble of the acronym in the “T” and that the trans underlies how “LGBT,” as a marker of subjectivity or violence, becom…
Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender
In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex---that is, to be cisgender---when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat as a…
Trans visibility and trans viability: A Roundtable
This Roundtable is crafted from the online event held on Saturday 20 November 2021 on Trans Visual Cultures. That event was organized to celebrate the recently published themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture on new work in transgender art and visual cultures, guest edited by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg, and suggested for the journal by Jill H Casid. The themed issue emerged from a session run at the College Art Association in New York…
Black Trans Feminism
In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an e…
All In
A T I O N , which is more like a philosophical encomium articulated through critical trans theorizing, as it were, engendered immense timidity.Timidity, yes, because of something much grander than what is referred to as imposter syndrome.I am among thinkers who have edified me from afar, thinkers who are quite deeply responsible for the modalities through which I think.To wit, I have, in the hallway of my apartment-a high-ceilinged abode in Chica…
Queer as in Abolition Now
Queer as in Abolition Now!" introduces the special issue "Queer Fire: Liberation and Abolition." The issue brings together scholars, artists, and writers working at the intersections of queer theory, critical race studies, and radical activist movements to consider prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the co…
Playing and Hiding Joyfully in the Rubble
Marquis Bey's Black Trans Feminism (2022) puts forth radical gender abolition as the necessary actualization of blackness and transness toward hopeful world de/construction. An intentional, ongoing work of stepping aside from expected regimes replaces material identitary stances and aims to embrace possibility rather than hold us down. The present conversational piece, fostering critical reflection in/on kinship and interested in evading discipli…
Sociology (26 works) · Race, History, and American Society (17 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works)