Cistem failure : essays on Blackness and cisgender

Author / Creator

Bey, Marquis, author

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Online

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Summary

"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, cisgender, ...

"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, 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 of a category to hold the myriad ways that people-who 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"--

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