ABOUT MARQUIS
Black. Trans. Theorist.
BIO
Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, and English, and core faculty in Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Bey is the author of multiple books: Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism (U of Arizona Press, 2019), 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. 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.
Bey is also the author of Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, a collection of autotheory essays that explores the relationship, or unrelationship, between blackness and the category of cisgender.
Bey's academic writing has been published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, African American Review, Social Text, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. Their expertise on trans subjectivity, nonbinariness, black feminism, and abolition has been featured in interviews with NPR, LGBTQ Nation, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, and New Books Network.
ACCOLADES
Race and Justice Collaborative Seed Fund
Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow
Truman Capote PhD Writer’s Award
Humanities New York Public Humanities Fellowship
2020-2021 Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies (for article “Black Fugitivity Un/Gendered”)
Provost Faculty Grant for Research in Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts, Northwestern University
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Journal Editorial Board Member
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly
Women & Language
liquid blackness
University Press Book Series Editorial Board Member
Queering Contemporary Americas, a book series with Amsterdam University Press
MF!: Momentary Futures In/Of Black Studies, a book series with University of Texas Press
Transgender Theory, a book series with Bloomsbury Press