About

Marquis Bey is a Professor of Black Studies at Northwestern University. They hold a Ph.D. in English from Cornell University (2019) and a B.A. in English, American Studies, and Philosophy from Lebanon Valley College (2014). Bey's work focuses on thinking of blackness as 'paraontological,' which they utilize to explore questions of nonnormative subjectivity through race, gender, and personhood. Their scholarship employs black feminist theory, trans and nonbinary studies, and abolitionist theory to articulate a project of black trans feminism that challenges normative constraints such as white supremacy, cisnormativity, and heteropatriarchy, as well as categories of race and gender. Bey is the author of 'Black Trans Feminism' and 'Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender,' both published by Duke University Press in 2022, and is working on a three-volume collection of critical essays on 'jailbreaking' gender, race, and class. They prefer they/them pronouns as an expression of their irreverence toward the gender binary and their ongoing relationship with gender nonbinariness.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Philosophy
• History
• Gender studies
• Art
• Law
• Epistemology
• Psychology
• Aesthetics
• Visual arts
• Psychoanalysis
• Political economy
• Mathematics
• Social psychology
• Art history
• Linguistics
• Geography
• Pure mathematics
• Theology
• Ancient history
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• Anonymous genders

  Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy · 2025-09-13 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• Faceless

  2024-03-29

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  To refuse the gender binary is a criminal act, and trans antagonism—a violence that manifests along a spectrum from head-shaking disapproval to death—is at base a vociferous coercion to confess. This chapter’s aim is to consider what happens when one’s body belies what they wish it to be. For those who are read as cis, they have not undergone the alterations potent with gendered signification and are not trans(gender) in a sense that registers with how such an identity is made tentatively legible, so what claim do cis people have to a gendered subjectivity that is in fact a nonconfession, a confessional refusal, a desire for facelessness? And how might someone’s Blackness muddy the already muddy waters of gender alignment, that uneven epidermis indexical of an anoriginal lawlessness lacerative of the “cis” of cisgender, intimate with the “trans” of transgender?

  PublisherDOI

• We Must Abolish the Conditions of the Unbearable: A Conversation with Marquis Bey

  Women's studies quarterly · 2024-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract: 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 the article appears, with Goldberg asking Bey to explain their thinking around “the unbearable” or the abject as they relate to the framework of black trans feminism. From there, the conversation turns to the roles of affect, desire, and disagreement in feminist theorization and argument as well as an extended consideration of metaphors of “holding” in Bey’s work and beyond. The conversation closes with a critical and loving exchange over questions of violence in abolitionist politics and movements and the risks we take on in trying to abolish the conditions of unbearable life at various levels.

  PublisherDOI

• NB-ous: On the Coalitional Drive of the Nonbinary

  Women's studies quarterly · 2023-09-01 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  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 from misuse or misunderstanding. There is in fact something in nonbinariness that refuses this impulse, it seems—something that has long asserted that even if this or that meant X (or shall we say "Q" or whatever other non-X/Y letter so as not to imply gender- and sex-laden allusions) in its supposed origins, in its etymological DNA, as it were, it does not mean that it must be that now, true-bluely. Because what is nonbinariness if not to say, to demand, that yeah, maybe I was Q when I was young, and even when I started to get older, but I am not that now. And do not have to be. And do not wish to be. Like Beans Velocci, who I have met briefly, on a brisk evening in Philadelphia (my hometown) in a heated restaurant tent enjoying food and company and intellectuality, I was made trans. Not, as with Velocci, by Foucault—although he is a supplemental culprit, just not the primary actor—but by other things. In my case, by suggestions and experiences and drives and, too, cartoons. I speak to this in my book Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, where I detail across multiple essays the ways that Dragonball Z or The Powerpuff Girls were sites of imaginative inhabitation, where what was extant in my world did not have to be all of the possibilities for myself; the ways this movement of a hand or rejection of a space or unfitness within a community were sites of exquisite rebellion and testament to how we could move differently, think differently, en- and ungender differently in proximity to unsanctioned imaginaries. I came to my nonbinariness [End Page 313] by way of a double refusal: I was refused entry into this or that space, this or that modality, expected as it was and predicated on criteria far less attractive to me than most; but, too, I refused those spaces in tiny, muted ways. They did not want me, at least as I wished to be and become, and I did not want them—there was, in short, "a throwing up of hands and an embrace of the refusal that was the term nonbinary" (Velocci 2022, 476). I love this refusal, a term I have returned to over and over, to the point of exhaustion now, it feels to me, but a term that continues to emerge for its utility, its depth, its feeling of Yes, that's it. Because it is in that refusal, or whatever one wishes to call it—I hope it is clear that I am not too hung up on the words one uses, as long as they allow you, us, to do and be and reach for the thing we are working toward—that something is going on. That is, very often it seems that much of the scholarship or the activism out there tries to explain the extant categorizations, making them seem softer, more natural, more workable, kinder, but nevertheless, still there. Always such an equalizing of "men" and "women," or making more palatable masculinity ("Men are allowed to cry! That will solve everything," or some such quip), or if only we found instances of homosexuality "in nature" then all the homophobes would realize they were wrong, or just be comfortable with your gender expression. The list elaborates ad infinitum. In all of this, "The focus . . . [i]s not, for the most part, liberation from sex and gender so much as an effort to explain these categories' construction," Velocci goes on to say (477). This is frustrating, not so much because of the violence an insistence on the gender binary might cause, though that is nothing at which to...

  PublisherDOI

• All My Friends Are Trans (or Will Be Soon)

  TSQ Transgender Studies Quarterly · 2023-11-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract 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, trans.

  PublisherDOI

• Insurgent trans study

  2023-02-08 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter focuses on three different concepts that seem implicit to intersectionality—and indeed to contemporary social justice work and politics of the Left in general—and provides the grounds on which trans study moves away from, appositional to, or generatively against the grain of them. Those concepts are categoricality, monolithism, and the visual or representation. Fleischmann's preferential floating in parentheticals is a desire to “be” antecategorical, to emerge through that which is cast aside in order for the rest to come through as existent. The categorical, even when a marginalized category, is an enforcement, not merely an acknowledgement. Insurgent trans study cares little for the ways that one “must” reckon with “reality” because reality is often a masquerade for the normative axes along which social intelligibility and life happen; reality disallows radical imaginations of abolition, in other words.

  PublisherDOI

• Playing and Hiding Joyfully in the Rubble

  Social Text · 2023-09-01

  articleSenior author

  Abstract 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 disciplinary pledges, explores underlying themes of Bey's fugitive theorization, such as undefining, opacity, queer excess, playful performativity, and the destabilization of “solid” ground. Desloover and Bey discuss the avoidance of ontological gendering violence in practice and the necessary forgoing of identities held near and dear. They touch on xenogender proliferation, which could lead not only to fracturing the oppressive binary but also to obliterating gender as colonial cis-heteropatriarchy knows it — to release the need for “making sense” and let it remake itself over and again. Bey describes the stifling experience of (en)forced embodiment of attributed/assumed privilege, claiming nonbinariness on/as the way to wider spaces that skirt required legibility. How can we run (off) from socially imposed and oppressive terrain that forecloses possible unruly existences? Yearnings for the vastness of the “not quite” that-which-is-given ripple beneath the surface of the nameable and speak ofthe elsewhere Bey desires without tying it too tightly to defining words. Playful joy from and for radically healing openness is shared and upheld here to elude the paralyzing exhaustion caused by a “cistem” that cannot possibly hold us.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Abolition Politics

  South Atlantic Quarterly · 2023-06-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  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 abolition is and seeks.Certainly, the clarification here will not settle the record on abolition's meaning, nor is that the aim; instead, we seek only to supplement abolition with a multifaceted articulation of additional ways-philosophical, geographical, and historical-the term can resound.In this contemporary moment, which is fed and sustained, fractured and cohered, by an assemblage of other moments, abolition as a term and practice has become, to say the least, a hot button issue.Often when it is discussed, it is in the context of prisons, and perhaps police, conversation often bearing the scope of should we or should we not get rid of prison/police?What will replace them if we got rid of them?In other words, abolition is a fulcrum around which questions of harm reduction, and specifically the institutions that proliferate harm, are debated.Let us, then, think intentionally about the terms under which we gather for this discursive occasion.Abolition, to introduce for the uninitiated and perhaps clarify for the already on board, has a history often rootedwhich is too often to say, immobilized-in particularity, namely the particularity of the cessation of slavery.Narrowly and simplistically, abolition is the term used for when slavery has ended, but we might begin to rethink the

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• Anybody, Everybody, All the Time

  liquid blackness · 2023-04-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract 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.

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• Cistem Failure

  2022-07-01 · 2 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender, showing that as a category, cisgender cannot capture how people depart from gender alignment and its coding as white.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eliza Steinbock

  Maastricht University

  2 shared

• Jack Halberstam

  Columbia University

  2 shared

• Susan Stryker

  2 shared

• Karma Lochrie

  Indiana University Bloomington

  1 shared

• Ruth Evans

  1 shared

• Joan Burgwinkle

  1 shared

• Sascha Crasnow

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  1 shared

• Theodora Sakellarides

  1 shared