Them Goon Rules
ISBN: 9780816539772
Platform/Publisher: Project MUSE / University of Arizona Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Chapters; Download: Chapters
Subjects: Gender identity.; Queer theory.; African American feminists; Blacks; Feminism;

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.


Marquis Bey is a PhD candidate in English at Cornell University. He has received fellowships from Humanities New York and the Ford Foundation.
hidden image for function call