Cistem Failure - (Asterisk) by Marquis Bey

About the Book

Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender, showing that as a category, cisgender cannot capture how people depart from gender alignment and its coding as white.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"Bey's conceptualization of gender as a prison and the surveillance that comes with it enriches the field of feminist abolition studies to think about how gender and carcerality are inherently entangled. Cistem Failure is an incredible contribution to destabilizing cisgender normativity and gender itself, as we move toward more liberating ways of existing through gender abolition."
--Kimberly Soriano "TSQ" (3/20/2024 12:00:00 AM)

"Marquis and their work provide much room for fruitful engagement with critical animal studies. . . . Marquis's form is highly artistic and this keeps their essays begging to be acknowledged and revisited, as any good piece of art should. Bey's writing is really an experience. They write otherwise as they encourage the reader to imagine otherwise, other ways of being."--Nathan Poirier "Journal for Critical Animal Studies" (11/1/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"Written with tongue-in-cheek humour and deep vulnerability, Cistem Failure speaks to scholar-activists across disciplines who are invested in livability and collective liberation. . . . Although Bey speaks only to their particular experience, they position themself as potential kin to anyone whose life does not map neatly onto the cistrans binary or who is committed to the project of gender abolition."--Derek P. Siegel "Ethnic and Racial Studies" (1/20/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"In 2019, Bey's debut collection Them Goon Rules changed me as a scholar, a feminist, an accomplice and a person; Black Trans Feminism is just as imperative. I forced myself to decide between this one and Bey's Cistem Failure, which was also released this year. Well, hell, just read 'em both."--Karla J. Strand "Ms. Magazine" (12/24/2022 12:00:00 AM)

"I found Cistem Failure by Marquis Bey really exciting. In it, Bey wonders whether and how blackness is at odds with cisgender identity. I love when a book articulates things I haven't been able to put into words. It is as if something that had been squirming inside me settles."--Chantal V. Johnson "The Millions" (12/2/2022 12:00:00 AM)

About the Author

Marquis Bey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern University and author of several books, most recently Black Trans Feminism, also published by Duke University Press.