Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Anthropology
Episode: Marquis Bey, "Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender" (Duke UP, 2022)
Description: InĀ Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and CisgenderĀ (Duke UP, 2022), Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that āmatchesā oneās 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 theĀ The Powerpuff GirlsĀ to the greeting āHow ya mamaānāem?ā 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 gen...