ABOUT MARQUIS

BIO

Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies, and affiliate 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), The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (U of Minnesota Press, 2020), and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (Duke University Press, 2022).

 

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 Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory, forthcoming with Bloombury Press in their Transgender Theory series, edited by Ciara Cremin and Abraham Weil. Nonbinary Life proposes a radical refusal: to relinquish gender as a framework we carry – for ourselves and for others – and to embrace modes of being that exist outside of its grasp. What if we no longer let gender be a way of organizing ourselves? Spanning the question of pronouns, masculinity, love, family, language, and even the Redwood National Forest, Nonbinary Life blends memoir and theory to provide a robust and personal treatment of what it means to live beyond the binary.

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Bey's academic writing has been published in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, African American Review, Social Text, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and numerous other venues. 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

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PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

Journal Editorial Board Member

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

Women & Language

liquid blackness

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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