by Marquis Bey
Duke University Press, 2022
eISBN: 978-1-4780-2303-6 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1580-2 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1844-5
Library of Congress Classification HQ18.55.B496 2022

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ABOUT THIS BOOK
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, to be 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 as a category to hold the myriad ways that people who may or 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 abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus.

See other books on: Bey, Marquis | Blackness | Gender expression | Gender identity | Transgender Studies
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