Black trans-feminist scholar Dr. Marquis Bey will take part in dialogues on campus as part of the Leadership for Liberation Pop-Up Library series, hosted by Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) – a unit of the Dean of Students Office.
Bey, author of the book Black Trans Feminism (Duke University Press, 2022) will hold an open space dialogue from 3-4:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 25, at the Multicultural Center. The event is free and open to the University community.
A follow-up dialogue session for University faculty and staff will be 10 a.m.-noon Wednesday, October 26 in the Circus Room of the Bone Student Center.
Bey will guide participants in thinking about the ways that radical gender justice—not simply “inclusion” or “acceptance” but fundamental interrogation and critique of gender normativity—serves as an avenue into liberating everyone. From the lens of black trans feminist praxis and politics, participants will learn to question gender’s harms in themselves, how gender operates at a systemic level, and what small things can be done to cultivate a more just relationship to others.
These talks are part of the Leadership for Liberation Pop-Up Library, a collaborative project between LEAD and Milner Library exploring the interconnections between critical leadership and academic libraries. Other collaborators include the Division of Student Affairs, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program (WGSS), and the Multicultural Center
For more information, contact Leadership Education and Development (LEAD), a unit of the Dean of Students Office, at LEADILSTU@ilstu.edu.
Dr. Marquis Bey
Bey is an assistant professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University, serving as an advisory board faculty member of critical theory, and as faculty affiliate and advisory board member of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Bey is the author of multiple books, including 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 work 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.
Currently, Bey is revising a collection of auto theory essays on blackness and cisgender, forthcoming in the fall of 2022 with Duke University Press, titled Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and 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.
