Nonbinary Life

An invitation to imagine the possibilities of life outside of gender, Nonbinary Life is a lyrical and genre-defying work of autotheory.

When Marquis Bey pronounces the word nonbinary , it rhymes simultaneously with abolition, utopia, nope, and why not? Rather than launching a counterpolemic to characterizations of the nonbinary as a positionality without a politics, Bey disengages from those agonistics to imagine a freedom beyond the carcerality of gender.

Marquis Bey’s Non-Binary Life is a lovely and poetic personal meditation on living non-binary in a way-too-binary world—on race and class and burner genders, on the real cost of telling gender truths, and of sometimes just saying ' Sorry, but no' to gender.

Marquis Bey is Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, USA. They are the author of Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender (2022), Black Trans Feminism (2022), Anarcho-blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism (2020), Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism (2019).