Black Trans Feminism

Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University and author of The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender, Anarcho-Blackness: Notes toward a Black Anarchism, and Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism.

“In Marquis Bey's deeply creative and fiercely imaginative book, Black trans feminism describes a kind of worldly inhabitation and a radical form of theorizing power and refusal in ways that are not contingent on identity. In Bey's hands, Black trans feminism becomes a powerful call for vulnerability, fugitive hope, abolition, and freedom. Black Trans Feminism allows us to gesture to all that we want from this world but do not yet know how to name.” - Jennifer C. Nash, author of (Birthing Black Mothers) “In its deep engagements with the three movements of its title, Black Trans Feminism is a very exciting book to read, digest, and think through. Marquis Bey’s focus on fugitivity and the elastic category of the fugitive stealing themself back is a highly salient and timely conceptual offering, and I’m astonished by the clarity, precision, and deep-digging that Bey brings to the material. Those working at the interstices of Black trans feminism need this gift of manifest lucidity to reference, teach, and expound on.” - Eliza Steinbock, author of (Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change) “Black Trans Feminism constitutes an incisive critique and interrogation of the very grammars of gender normativity. . . . With this project, he attempts to reconfigure how we understand kinship, blackness, transness and Black feminism in order to establish a coalition that can be understood as a broadening of kinship network relationalities, affinities and affiliations.” - Marietta Kosma (European Journal of American Culture) "Bey’s work is an important contribution to the conversations surrounding race, transgender identity, and feminist praxis, providing a hopeful mode for reimagining our world and ourselves. . . . Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." - D. E. Magill (Choice) “Black Trans Feminism is a deep philosophical and literary exploration of Black trans feminism. . . . The book offers critical and imaginative visions of gender radical and abolitionist futures. Bey tell us how we can possibly get there with a sense of hope that is so rare in academic writing.” - Nishant Upadhyay (American Quarterly) "Bey’s work is bold, generative, and bracing in what can feel a deadlocked debate, with much to offer feminist scholars interested in identity and power."- Alanah Mortlock (European Journal of Women's Studies) "It seems that everyone is talking about blackness, transness, and feminism, and in that sense, this book matters a great deal in that it is positioned to be a go-to for thinking through these urgent questions. Eccentric subjectless, and desedimenting, Bey’s Black Trans Feminism sets out to exceed the identity project, instead proffering a transformational, unfixed subjectivity." - Abraham B. Weil (The Black Scholar)

• Acknowledgments  ixIntroduction: Abolition, Gender Radicality  1Part 11. Black, Trans, Feminism  372. Fugitivity, Un/gendered  663. Trans/figurative, Blackness  88Part 24. Feminist, Fugitivity  1155. Questioned, Gendered  1456. Trigger, Rebel  175Conclusion: Hope, Fugitive  199Notes  229Bibliography  263Index  283