Full Description
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.
Contents
Preface. Cistem Failure ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Back in the Day 1
Heart of Cisness 21
How Ya Mama'n'em? 47
Notes on (Trans)Gender 61
Blowing Up Narnia 87
RE: [No Subject] 105
The Coalition of Gender Abolition 129
Notes 147
Bibliography 153
Index 161
