This talk will offer insights into how we might dismantle the gender binary and cisnormativity. In other words, throughout the talk the speaker will offer ideas and assertions posited in trans studies in service of making the world more just by working toward the destruction of oppressive systems such as gender, gender normativity, and cisgender supremacy. This will be carried out through critical meditations on common biological beliefs, debunking transphobic rationales, and the possibilities for a better world through the speaker’s relationship to cartoons.

About the Presenter
Marquis Bey (they/them, or any pronoun) is Assistant Professor of African American Studies and English, and core faculty of Critical Theory, at Northwestern University. They specialize in transgender studies, black feminism, and critical theory. The author most recently of The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (Minnesota, 2020) and the forthcoming Black Trans Feminism (Duke, 2022), Bey is currently working on a collection of autotheory essays concerning the relationship between blackness and cisgender.