Show Notes
Do we perhaps deserve the impossible? This is only one of the many beautiful questions Marquis Bey asks in this poem of an episode. Marquis is an exquisite thinker who joins me to speak about the incredible book Black Trans Feminism and share thoughts about why such a feminism is for everyone. Marquis speaks about how literature allows us to imagine new possibilities to exist in the world and see how everything is entangled with everything else. Join me to learn from Marquis, to think about abolition, coalition, fugitivity and traniflesh, and to imagine what the world could be beyond the realistic and the possible.
References: https://www.marquisbey.com/ Marquis Bey’s Black Trans Feminism (Duke UP, 2022) Marquis Bey’s Cistem Failure (Duke UP, 2022) Marquis Bey’s The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) Marquis Bey’s “RE: [No Subject]—On Nonbinary Gender.” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences (2022) Saidiya Hartman Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archive and Undrowned Lauryn Hill Denise Ferreira da Silva Toni Morrison N.K. Jemisin Octavia Butler Rivers Solomon Andrew Cutrone Sarah Jane Cervenak Fred Moten Roxane Gay Stefano Harney Jack Halberstam Tina Campt Ralph Ellison Traniflesh Emma Heaney Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe” K. Marshall Green Treva Ellison Tranifest Spillers, Hortense, et al. "" Whatcha gonna do?": Revisiting ‘Mama's baby, papa's maybe:’ An American grammar book": A conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, & Jennifer L. Morgan." Women's Studies Quarterly 35.1/2 (2007): 299-309. Abraham Weil https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua_Hm6wePro Ciara Cremin Transgender Theory (Bloomsbury) https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/transgender-theory/ A Nonbinary Life (forthcoming) Asterisk (Duke UP) https://www.dukeupress.edu/series/asterisk-gender-trans-and-all-that-comes-after Jian Neo Chen Susan Stryker Eliza Steinbock C. Riley Snorton’s Black On Both Sides Jess Goldberg’s Abolition Time Frieren
Questions you should be able to respond to after listening: What is Black Trans Feminism? Why is it for everyone? How can identities provide comfort and safety and why is that not always useful? What are the terms Marquis thinks about in relation to allyship? How does Marquis define traniflesh? Which thinkers inform Marquis’ thinking about fugitivity and what is the central metaphor Marquis introduces here? What might be challenging about thinking Black Trans Feminism in the way Marquis proposes it? How do you feel about the impossible and the unrealistic?
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