black studies | trans studies | gender studies
Cistem Failure
Essays on Blackness and Cisgender
MARQUIS BEY
TEM
Bey
URE
Essays on Blackness and Cisgender
Marquis
August 184 pages paper, 978-1-4780-1844-5 $24.95tr/£18.99 cloth, 978-1-4780-1580-2 $94.95/£76.00
Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University and author of several books, most recently Black Trans Feminism, also published by Duke University Press.
“‘Cisgender is, irrevocably, fundamentally, antiblack.’ This is what Marquis Bey wishes for readers to confront and comprehend, no matter the discomfort. Bey investigates what animates the facticity of gender. In this highly theoretical and deeply personal book, Bey breaks open and digs into the peculiar fears and failures of cisness while also theorizing a future abolition of gender. A future that imagines coalitional politics where constructs of gender are infinitely undone.”—L. H. STALLINGS, Professor of African American Studies, Georgetown University “As a work of trans studies, Cistem Failure is instantly essential in humbly claiming space as the first book-length work on cisgender that, fantastically, isn’t hampered by either its whiteness or its lack of attention to Blackness. Finding something I would characterize as having been on the cusp of being said and yet unsaid either for the past few years, or the past few centuries, or both, it shifts the discursive terrain in and outside of the academy. I am grateful for this urgent and careful book.” —JULES GILL-PETERSON, author of Histories of the Transgender Child
In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks what does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s sex, that is, cisgender, when decades of feminist theory have destroyed the belief that there is some natural way to be a sex? Moving from the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “how ya mama’n’em” to their own gender identity, Bey finds that cisgender is too flat of a category to hold the myriad ways that people—who may not have undergone gender affirmative interventions—depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as white: just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender aboli tion project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus. ASTERISK Gender, Trans-, and All That Comes After A series edited by Susan Stryker, Eliza Steinbock, and Jian Neo Chen
Also by Marquis Bey Black Trans Feminism paper, $27.95/£20.99 978-1-4780-1781-3 / 2022
BLACK TRANS FEMINISM
M A RQ U IS B EY
8
Queer Fire Liberation and Abolition coedited with Jesse A. Goldberg A special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (28:2) paper, $12.00/£9.99 978-1-4780-1733-2 / 2022
