ABOUT MARQUIS

Black. Trans. Theorist.

BIO

Marquis Bey is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, advisory board faculty member of Critical Theory, and faculty affiliate and advisory board member of Gender and Sexuality Studies 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 LGBTQ Nation, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, CNN, USA Today, and We Be Imagining Podcast.

ACCOLADES

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