Cistem Failure

In <i>Cistem Failure</i> 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 <i>The Powerpuff Girls</i> 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 white: 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.