DR. MARQUIS BEY

Dr. Marquis Bey (they/them, or any pronoun)* completed a PhD in English at Cornell University in May 2019 and is currently Professor of Black Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and English, and core faculty in Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Bey's work, broadly speaking, concerns Black Feminist Theorizing, Transgender Studies, Critical Theory, and abolition. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation and Humanities New York.

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Bey is the author of Black Trans Feminism and, most recently, Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (both published with Duke University Press, 2022).

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*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.