“‘Cisgender is irrevocably, fundamentally antiblack.’ This is what Marquis Bey wishes for readers to confront and comprehend, no matter the discomfort. Bey investigates what animates the facticity of gender. In this highly theoretical and deeply personal book, Bey breaks open and digs into the peculiar fears and failures of cisness while also theorizing a future abolition of gender. A future that imagines a coalitional politics in which constructs of gender are infinitely undone.” - L.H. Stallings, Professor of African American Studies, Georgetown University
“As a work of trans studies, Cistem Failure is instantly essential in humbly claiming space as the first book-length work on cisgender that, fantastically, isn’t hampered by either its whiteness or its lack of attention to blackness. Finding something I would characterize as having been on the cusp of being said and yet unsaid either for the past few years or the past few centuries, or both, it shifts the discursive terrain in and outside of the academy. I am grateful for this urgent and careful book.” - Jules Gill-Peterson, author of Histories of the Transgender Child
"I found Cistem Failure by Marquis Bey really exciting. In it, Bey wonders whether and how blackness is at odds with cisgender identity. I love when a book articulates things I haven’t been able to put into words. It is as if something that had been squirming inside me settles." - Chantal V. Johnson, The Millions
"In 2019, Bey’s debut collection Them Goon Rules changed me as a scholar, a feminist, an accomplice and a person; Black Trans Feminism is just as imperative. I forced myself to decide between this one and Bey’s Cistem Failure, which was also released this year. Well, hell, just read ‘em both." - Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine
“Marquis and their work provide much room for fruitful engagement with critical animal studies. . . . Marquis’s form is highly artistic and this keeps their essays begging to be acknowledged and revisited, as any good piece of art should. Bey’s writing is really an experience. They write otherwise as they encourage the reader to imagine otherwise, other ways of being.” - Nathan Poirier, Journal for Critical Animal Studies
“Written with tongue-in-cheek humour and deep vulnerability, Cistem Failure speaks to scholar-activists across disciplines who are invested in livability and collective liberation. . . . Although Bey speaks only to their particular experience, they position themself as potential kin to anyone whose life does not map neatly onto the cistrans binary or who is committed to the project of gender abolition.” - Derek P. Siegel, Ethnic and Racial Studies
"[Cistem Failure] is therefore much more than excellent literature for the study of gender and gender/blackness; it is also a call to action for us to also engage with ourselves in our own perception of self as applies to gender. It is an invitation for its reader to reach beyond the theory and dare to find ourselves in the praxis of existence outside of an oppressive cistem of gender that will never accept us anyway."
- Venus Fultz,
European Journal of American Culture
“Bey’s conceptualization of gender as a prison and the surveillance that comes with it enriches the field of feminist abolition studies to think about how gender and carcerality are inherently entangled. Cistem Failure is an incredible contribution to destabilizing cisgender normativity and gender itself, as we move toward more liberating ways of existing through gender abolition.”
- Kimberly Soriano, TSQ
