Marquis Bey

What Black liberation and anarchism have in common, and what they can offer each other.

Notes Toward a Black Anarchism

Anarcho-Blackness

Jesse A. Goldberg

This special issue brings together scholars, artists, and activists working at the intersections of queer theory, critical race studies, and radical movements to consider prison abolition as a project of queer liberation and queer liberation as an abolitionist project. Pushing beyond observations that prisons disproportionately harm queer people, the contributors demonstrate that gender itself is a carceral system and demand that gender and sexuality, too, be subject to abolition. The contributors offer fresh analytical lenses, personal reflections, and unequivocal calls to action to the ongoing work of constructing liberatory futures without prisons, police, or the tyranny of colonial gender systems. In the essays collected here, they explore trans identity and community across prison walls, consider how gentrification functions as a carceral mechanism, meditate on the importance and ethics of queer art, and argue for the necessity of anticarceral queer politics that do not look to punishment for justice. Contributors. Marquis Bey, Caia Maria Coelho, Stephen Dillon, Nadja Eisenberg-Guyot, Jesse A. Goldberg, Jaden Janak, Alexandre Martins, Alison Rose Reed, S. M. Rodriguez, Kitty Rotolo, Lorenzo Triburgo, Sarah Van Dyck

Liberation and Abolition

Queer Fire

In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, Venus Di’Khadija Selenite, and Dane Figueroa Edidi, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.

Black Trans Feminism

The Problem of the Negro As A Problem for Gender

The Trans*-ness of Blackness, The Blackness of Trans*-ness

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.

Essays on Blackness and Cisgender

Cistem Failure

"A collection of essays that unsettle normative ways of understanding Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness"--Provided by publisher.

Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism

Them Goon Rules

The first sustained treatment of nonbinary theory, transgender theory and the gender binary from the perspective of nonbinariness providing a lyrical, personal and theoretical account

An Autotheory

Nonbinary Life

Anarcho-Blackness seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism. Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Bey addresses this lack, not by constructing a new cannon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of Black feminist and transgender theory, he explores what we can learn by making this kinship explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter. If the state is predicated on a racialized and gendered capitalism, its undoing can only be imagined and undertaken by a political theory that takes race and gender seriously.

Marquis Bey

About

Books

Join the club