Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, and core faculty in Gender & Sexuality Studies and Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. Their work concerns transgender and nonbinary studies, black feminist theory, abolition, and contemporary literature. They are the author, most recently, of Black Trans Feminism and Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender, both published in 2022 with Duke University Press.
Marquis Bey
Contributions
Epistemology of Hoodies: On the Black and Nonbinary
It was 1:14pm central standard time on a Friday. There was a meme on reddit. An image of what looked like knights around a stone table. They held their swords out, guiding them in coalition, not, in this meme, in “brotherhood,” facing the center of the table. A redditor annotated each sword: one sword labeled “gamers,” another “college students.” The remaining three swords, the swords in the middle of this phalanx, were labeled “trans women,” “trans men,” and “nonbinaries.” Each of these coalitional swords that are not, and refuse, brotherhood point to the table’s center which the redditor also annotated: “wearing oversized hoodies.”