A theoretical and yet also vernacular approach to “the rules” as they are made and unmade.
“I’m deeply concerned with dismantling white supremacist ideologies, cisnormative ideologies, heteropatriarchy, elitism, and colonialism.”
In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Marquis Bey. Bey is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow and PhD candidate in the English department at Cornell University. His book is Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Marquis Bey:There’s often a nebulousness around the term “political climate” when it gets deployed, so I want to be very clear about how I understand it. This political climate is one characterized by white supremacy, transantagonism, heteropatriarchy, and carcerality. And these all need to be, in no unsure terms, abolished. My book grows out of this very political climate. As one of the book’s anonymous reviewers described it, Them Goon Rules is a “long-form essayistic sermon” surveying the current landscape. While I have my own atheistic qualms with the theological language, I think the characterization is apt because the essays are different iterations of me trying to get at what I think is not quite right and how I might imagine something in excess of it. The essays want that other thing, the something else.
“The essays are different iterations of me trying to get at what I think is not quite right.”
In some way, each essay concerns Blackness, feminism, queerness, and nonnormative genders. These are the things that bear very acutely on the current political climate. I also maintain, however, that these things are not reducible to a reactionary posture against the regimes listed above; they have a life of their own, they look at themselves through one another and assess their value on their own terms irrespective of hegemony. Through Black feminism broadly conceived, we get an accurate glimpse into the gizzards and guts of the political climate, so I don’t know why I would turn to any other avenue to do so.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
In short, that there is always a theory embedded within praxis; that the Black radical tradition shows that the two are always imbricated within one another. My most legible identity is as an academic, and there is a significant extent to which that connotes an immersion in academic theory. I own that, both because I love the theory I read and because it circumscribes my audience in ways I must attend to. My writing is most definitely theoretical, but it is also vernacular and shows how the things my mother and grandmother have said to or around me is, too, a kind of theorizing—in, as Barbara Christian would say, the form of the hieroglyph. I write theory, yes, but that theory is woven in and through vernacular, which is also to say that vernacular is theoretical.
I also want to note that I yearn for a bit of a shift in activist work that takes into account the work as the basis for the activism. Be clear: this is not to say there aren’t folks out there doing this kind of work, from anarchist groups to trans feminist grassroots coalitions to organizations like the Audre Lorde Project. My yearning is still, however, for a proliferation of a shift in thinking less toward an activist organization predicated on a common identity—the exact definitions for which are very often unclear to me—and more toward a commitment to a certain kind of work and liberatory vision as the basis for inclusion in that organization.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Yeah, I’m looking to dismantle a bunch of ideologies, namely ideologies of variegated violences. In particular, I’m deeply concerned with dismantling white supremacist ideologies, cisnormative ideologies, heteropatriarchy, elitism, and colonialism. All of these are regimes that greatly structure our world, and thus dismantling them necessitates what many others have rightly deemed the end of the world. I, though, want to nuance this away from a masculinist texture that implies incendiary conflagrations and armed revolution and toward something in the vein of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Black feminist world after the end of the world (see her book M Archive: After the End of the World). My goal is to un-learn the aforementioned violences—Them Goon Rules is, after all, an “un-rule book”—and to give deep, serious, rigorous thought to what comes after that end.
My essays think about the conditions and texture of the world that might come after, the world and people that are otherwise than this.
Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?
I have a selection of intellectual loves, if you will, that I can’t help but carry around with me. The three most notable are Fred Moten, C. Riley Snorton, and Hortense Spillers. All of them provide me with radical theorizations in Black Queer Studies and Black Feminism that have led me to the work that I can’t help but do.
Moten, for example, has gifted me with an understanding of Blackness as and through fugitivity—which is to say, following Tina Campt, a quotidian practice of refusal. Too, because of this, he is responsible for my getting into a bit of trouble inasmuch as I unfix Blackness from physiognomy and look for it not simply in the people who are called Black but, more robustly to me, in a certain mobilization of subversive irregularity that aims toward a kind of subjectless subjectivity. That is, Blackness, for me, becomes a modality—a posture, a disposition, a way of living—of escaping various regimes of capture and captivity.
Snorton, in turn, is fundamental to my commitment to transness as a critical engagement with gender as it is imbricated with Blackness. His work signals a paradigmatic shift in delinking Blackness and transness from sedimented rubrics of embodiment and placing them in circulation with movement and with other modes of being that are not predicated on normative and hegemonic templates. His work signals, in other words, a commitment to life.
“Blackness, for me, becomes a modality—a posture, a disposition, a way of living—of escaping various regimes of capture and captivity.”
And Spillers is a demi-god in the fields in which my work finds a home. You can’t read anything in Black Studies or Black feminism that does not cite Spillers. Notions of “flesh,” “ungendering,” and “saying ‘yes’ to the female within” are pervasive and all are indebted to Spillers. I am fundamentally inspired by her willingness to take thoughts as deeply as they will go, to maintain an unwavering seriousness when it comes to thinking the thoughts that few dare to think.
In what way does your book help us imagine new worlds?
My hope is that the book, in envisioning “go[ing] by them goon rules,” is the start of living in those new worlds. That is precisely my commitment: to the imagination and how it might make us freer, how the imagination can engender other kinds of worlds in which we can live—and, to be sure, how imagination might let us peer into the new and other worlds already here.
My book contributes to this already-existing tradition of critiquing the world we have inherited and demanding something else. Indeed, one of the essays in the book (“Scenes of Illegible Shadow Genders”) writes toward precisely that. That essay uses a person I’ve seen time and again as an occasion to think through what might have been in terms of genders. The phrase I’ve come to really like, and that I’ve come to consider the closest approximation to what I’m getting at, is: those genders that might have been but for the regime of Gender. The world in which those genders reside, that’s what I write toward and want to imagine on the page.
Roberto Sirventis Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network. He is co-author, with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong, of the forthcoming book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror.
COMMENTS?
Please join the conversation on Black Agenda Report's Facebook page at http://facebook.com/blackagendareport
Or, you can comment by emailing us at [email protected]
Black citizenship was non-existent for the first 200 years that enslaved and free people were present in what became the United States. Even long-standing legal victories are tenuous, and now…
“Haitian refugees and political exiles find themselves being refused the hospitality granted others.”
The U.S.-brokered 'peace deal' between Rwanda and the DRC whitewashes Rwanda’s occupation and M23 militia crimes.
Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialist vision won NYC’s primary but lost Black voters to scandal-plagued Cuomo by 20 points, exposing the left’s racial blind spot even as Wall Street prepares to spend…
Trump’s ‘peace deal’ between Rwanda and the DRC is a corporate resource grab disguised as diplomacy, rewarding Rwandan war crimes while U.S. investors stake claims to Congo’s coltan mines.
