Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender

by Marquis Bey

In Cistem Failure Marquis Bey meditates on the antagonistic relationship between blackness and cisgender. Bey asks, What does it mean to have a gender that “matches” one’s 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 the The Powerpuff Girls to the greeting “How ya mama’n’em?” 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 gender-affirmative interventions depart from gender alignment. At the same time, blackness, they contend, strikes at the heart of cisgender’s invariable coding as just as transness names a non-cis space, blackness implies a non-cis space. By showing how blackness opens up a way to subvert the hegemonic power of the gender binary, Bey makes a case for an antiracist gender abolition project that rejects cisgender as a regulatory apparatus.

Genres: Philosophy, Gender, Race, Nonfiction, Transgender, Theory, LGBT

184 pages, Hardcover

Published August 2, 2022

Reviews

[Roshan Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual, Bey's prose at a sentence level is poetic and gorgeous. It got a little bogged down in the middle because it became all about Bey for a chapter or two. And their defensiveness is understandable but unproductive. I loved three quarters of it, lots to think about!

[sawyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this one pretty fast as I didn't annotate it, and I don't see myself going back and annotating it anytime in the future.
I have read a few other works by Bey, and I have to say this might be one of my favorites-- although, the amount of academic jargon made it difficult to read at times. I found myself bogged down in a few chapters due to Bey talking about themself (although this defensiveness is completely prompted, I found it to be unproductive at times.) Examining the cis-trans binary, blackness, and white supremacy through the a intersectional lense is everything but a new idea. And Bey touches on topics that most authors, professors, and historians have discussed across multiple platforms. Yet, I think Bey also brought some topics to discussion that sometimes are brushed over and forgotten-- bringing a more well rounded view of things.
Overall, this is a text that I could easily analyze for a class/paper and I will probably pick something like this up again in the future. But, I also think that everything in this text can be found in texts I've already read (although it was nice to get a new perspective on it)

[Derek Siegel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rarely do I get the chance to read academic books from cover-to-cover, but this was great. Unfortunately, I probably wouldn't recommend to someone without a background in reading academic scholarship (it's well-written with a great sense of humor, but still contains a lot of disciplinary jargon). So if that's not you, here's my quick synopsis! Bey examines the cis-trans binary (the idea that everyone is either cisgender or transgender), arguing that it doesn’t capture our actual experiences, that it's rooted in white supremacy (black people are portrayed as deviant for not fulfilling the norms of white femininity & masculinity), and is a barrier to the coalitional politics we need to achieve collective liberation (basically how we need to organize around issues rather than identities, and it's not a good look to police who counts as trans or can organize around trans issues).

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

So glad I stumbled upon this a couple weeks ago on the shelves of Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. I read it for the 2023 #TransRightsReadathon (learn more here) and wrote
up some observations for the Trans Rights Readathon (on Medium, unpaywalled if you come via this link).

[Mystkue Writings · Rating 5 out of 5]

some complex vocabulary, however the concepts and themes were spelled out in a way that provided persuasive perspectives in ways that we have come to think about gender.

[thecoomer · Rating 1 out of 5]

This crap is as if an edgy teenager got publishing capabilities