Helena Marten
News Editor
On Thursday, Feb. 19, guest lecturer Marquis Bey gave a talk called “Jailbreaking Our Imaginations: A Meditation on Blackness, Transness and Everything Else,” in Lowry’s Allen Commons. Bey, a professor of Black studies and gender & sexuality studies at Northwestern University. They were invited by Wooster’s QTPOC to give a talk discussing the intersection of Black studies and gender studies, specifically regarding ideas of Black radicalism and trans-insurgency. Bey said they approached “these thoughts via study, love and a deep desire for a radical liberatory imagination.”
Bey identified the categories that are imposed upon them through socialized concepts such as race and gender. They established these restricting notions and the necessity of jailbreaking the collective mentality concerning these imposed identities. They stated that “jailbreaking our imaginations [is] learning to notice when what we call identity is also an architecture of confinement.” They reframed gender and race as concepts violently and non-consensually imposed upon individuals by colonial and hegemonic systems. Bey also discussed the idea of Blackness and gender being reclaimed and divorced from Western colonial systems. Bey challenged the ideas of social constructs, such as race and gender, “by which bodies become governable, sortable, punishable and therefore administrable,” said Bey.
Bey stated that jailbreaking must be in support of “abolition that must be more radical than we have dared to imagine. We cannot stop at the obvious violences ― the prison, the cop, the law ― while leaving intact the categories that underwrite those violences.” Suggesting “a heady recalibration of what we likely understood as Blackness, as queerness and transness, as Black queer and transness” and the recognition that “all of this raises the specter of a loss … the ability to covet and assume that this is only ours.”
Bey recognized the “solidarities forged in gendered terms” but proposed that “with some trembling ― that survival inside the structures is not the same as freedom from it.” Bey recognized that their talk was occurring during Black History Month and stated that their version of Black History Month is “grittier than the bestowing of a month that comes preloaded with the logics of legibility with networks and consumer goods that make Blackness palatable for the market — my Black History month is the Black radical tradition.” Bey offered the question of “if we give this up even this, in the face of all that Black people, Black women, Black queer people have lost … what do we have left?” They answered their own question, saying “we have everything else.”
At the end of their talk, Bey took questions from the audience. When asked what literary recommendations they have for students looking to expand their mindsets, Bey answered, “anything by Paul Preciado, particularly his texts ‘Can the Monster Speak?’ and ‘An Apartment on Uranus,’ Judith Butler’s work, especially the classic ‘Gender Trouble’ and their follow up to that, ‘Bodies That Matter,’ C. Riley Snorton’s ‘Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity’ and his latest ‘A Black Queer History of the United States,’ Dean Spade’s ‘Normal Life,’ Nevada’s ‘The Abolition of Law,’ [and] Akwaeke Emezi’s novels, especially ‘Pet.’”