In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, and Venus Di’Khadijah Selenite, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.

Marquis Bey’s debut collection, Them Goon Rules, is an un-rulebook, a long-form essayistic sermon that meditates on how Blackness and nonnormative gender impact and remix everything we claim to know. A series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicized Blackness, Black feminism, and queerness. Bey binds together his personal experiences with social justice work at the New York–based Audre Lorde Project, growing up in Philly, and rigorous explorations of the iconoclasm of theorists of Black studies and Black feminism. Bey’s voice recalibrates itself playfully on a dime, creating a collection that tarries in both academic and nonacademic realms. Fashioning fugitive Blackness and feminism around a line from Lil’ Wayne’s “A Millie,” Them Goon Rules is a work of “auto-theory” that insists on radical modes of thought and being as a refrain and a hook that is unapologetic, rigorously thoughtful, and uncompromising.

Anarcho-Blackness seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism. Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Bey addresses this lack, not by constructing a new cannon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of Black feminist and transgender theory, he explores what we can learn by making this kinship explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter. If the state is predicated on a racialized and gendered capitalism, its undoing can only be imagined and undertaken by a political theory that takes race and gender seriously.

"This book traces the long arc of Black women's relationship with technology from the antebellum south to the social media era demonstrating how digital culture transforms and is transformed by Black feminist thought"--

In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality's usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory's visionary world-making possibilities.

"TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly offers a high-profile venue for innovative research and scholarship that contest the objectification, pathologization, and exoticization of transgender lives. It publishes interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship. Its mission is to foster a vigorous conversation among scholars, artists, activists, and others that examines how "transgender" comes into play as a category, a process, a social assemblage, an increasingly intelligible gender identity, an identifiable threat to gender normativity, and a rubric for understanding the variability and contingency of gender across time, space, and cultures. Major topics addressed in the first few issues include the cultural production of trans communities, critical analysis of transgender population studies, transgender biopolitics, radical critiques of political economy, and problems of translating gender concepts and practices across linguistic communities"--Publisher's website.

This issue explores and questions the issuance of blackness to transgender identity, politics, and transgender studies. The editors ask why, in its processes of institutionalization and canon formation, transgender studies have been so remiss in acknowledging women-of-color feminisms--black feminisms in particular--as a necessary foundation for the field's own critical explorations of embodied difference. The essays also wrestle with the relationship between trans* studies and queer studies through the lens of blackness.