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:

1.      What is Black Trans Feminism? Why is it for everyone?
2.      How can identities provide comfort and safety and why is that not always useful?
3.      What are the terms Marquis thinks about in relation to allyship?
4.      How does Marquis define traniflesh?
5.      Which thinkers inform Marquis’ thinking about fugitivity and what is the central metaphor Marquis introduces here?
6.      What might be challenging about thinking Black Trans Feminism in the way Marquis proposes it?
7.      How do you feel about the impossible and the unrealistic?