DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

• marquis.bey@northwestern.edu
• 1860 Campus Drive, Crowe Hall, Room 5-103
• Office Hours: by appointment only. Make an appointment by email.

Marquis Bey is Full Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, where their research works across black feminist theory, trans and nonbinary studies, critical theory, and abolition. Their scholarship investigates blackness, gender, and personhood beyond the limits of identity, asking how forms of social and political life might emerge through the undoing of normative categories and structures of domination. Bey is the author of multiple books, most notably Black Trans Feminism (Duke, 2022) and Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory (Bloomsbury, 2026), among other books, essays, and chapters in Black Studies, feminist theory, and critical thought. Across their work, they develop an account of blackness, transness, and black feminism that refuses attachment to fixed identities and instead foregrounds practices of collective transformation and liberation. Their current projects extend these concerns through sustained engagement with questions of anti-identity politics, exceeding leftist sociality, and abolition they are tentatively calling Left of Left. At Northwestern, Bey teaches courses on black feminist theory, trans life, black masculinity, and contemporary critical theory. 

*Note on pronouns: The “preference” for they/them pronouns to describe myself is an attempt to mark my irreverence toward the gender binary, and to mark my tentative and always-in-process relationship to gender nonbinariness. Put differently, this is not to say I “am” nonbinary but, more pointedly, seek a nonbinaristic relationship to my own understanding of my gender—an attempted unrelation to gender, as it were. Thus, it matters less what pronoun one uses for me; I am, ultimately, pronoun indifferent. That capaciousness is simply another attempt to express an irreverence and disdain for the gender binary and the ways it might inhere in pronouns.

Publications:

Selected Books

Rogue Cinders: Jailbreaking Gender, Jailbreaking Race. University of Minnesota Press, 2027
Nonbinary Life: An Autotheory. Bloomsbury, 2026
Black Trans Feminism. Duke University Press, 2022

Selected Articles
“All My Friends Are Trans (Or Soon Will Be).” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (2023)
“Epistemology of Hoodies.” Modernism/modernity (2023)
“Incorporeal Blackness: A Theorization in Two Parts—Rachel Dolezal and Your Face In Mine.” CR: the New Centennial Review (2020)
“Black Fugitivity Un/gendered.” The Black Scholar (2019)