Them Goon Rules: Fugitive Essays on Radical Black Feminism

by Marquis Bey

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.

Genres: Feminism, Race, Essays, Nonfiction, Social Justice, Politics, Queer

184 pages, Paperback

First published February 19, 2019

Reviews

[Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection made me think so much--Bey really stretches the bounds of Blackness, of queerness, of transness. They ask us the consider Blackness divorced from the body, from the epidermal, from the visual, and instead to an occupying of a fugitive space and an aligning with liberatory politics. Great collection, but I would say my favorites/the strongest ones to me were "Them Goon Rules," "Dawg Fights," "The ALP Journals," and "Three Theses."

[William Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Hence, to “go by them goon rules“ is a praxis of unruliness in the sense that the deviancy
cast upon those who undermine systemic rule is mobilized in service of the deviant.... If the Law is a normative regime that rests on a fundamental violence, it stands that the subversion of Law precipitates the beginning of a non-violent way of relating to one another.” P23

… The uncertainty of my pronoun speaks to my constant pursuit to fail doing cisness, to be a bad cis subject, to queer-to whatever extent-not only what cisness might physically look like (which is what?)but the behaviors and tenants that one is coerced to do when believing, and encountering others who believe, that one is cis. Might even the question itself be doing work to this end: destabilizing this assumption of cisnormativity, querying ever-shifting gender identifications and refusing to presume that we have ever “know“? P66


“A radical gender politics that reaches for the otherwise-genders is an undoing a fundamental bedrocks of whom we have come to believe we are. And it is terrifying, holding the potential for both the dangerously reactive and the dangerously revolutionary. The extent to which we continue to rest our heads comfortably in the normative constitutive tenants of imposed genders is the extent to which we uphold the empire.” P.70

… how “allyship “is mobilized in problematic ways-namely, as a way to maintain and in fact foreground one’s hegemonic identification. For one to consistently tout their allyship and do that dance of “acknowledging their privilege“ keeps in tact the integrity of that identity rather than doing the work to destroy it. To be an ally becomes a political identity in itself, and the somewhat shallow one, as it becomes the purview from which one does one’s politics: not as someone “in the struggle “but as someone outside the struggle, cheering it on and shouting about how white/cis/male/straight/etc./etc./etc. they are, which means—*shrug*—that y’all do the work while I stand over here watching.”
P71

“Gender self-determination challenges
all structures of domination because gender pervades all of them, therefore any radical politics must include a radical, self determining gender politics. P82

“We cannot mobilize around, and actualize, the radically different world in which we wish to live until we refuse the one we have been given the refusal is where it’s at; the refusal, which is to say kind of inoculation of flesh against the supposed weightiness of normative physical and discursive structures, is the site of daring to exist otherwise.” P106

[Letlhogonolo Mokgoroane · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘So take this as a timid gift of my thoughts, thoughts that often go unexpressed; take this as a diffident display of my vulnerability; take this as a discursive act of overwhelming love.’

It took me a while to pen this review and I feel these words are not enough to capture of how this book changed me and challenged me. I felt deeply seen in this text.

This book is a series of essays that reads like a critical memoir, this work queries the function and implications of politicised 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.

This text is challenging. It asks us as people committed to freedom to think about the ways in which we aren’t free. It demands of us to interrogate our methods towards freedom. To rethink, reshape, and reimagine our lives by being fugitive.

Bey through this work asks us to become fugitive, to dwell in the discursive place, to perpetually say ‘nah’.

Bey from the very beginning invites us to be unruly and in that unruliness, we fight to stay alive in our fullness.

The unruliness invites us to radically imagine. As Bey writes ‘I want a fugitive Black feminism that has as its bedrock a powerful imagination capable of envisioning what is not, and has never been, the case, but must be.’

This book is brilliant. It demands us to constantly refuse. In this refusal, we steal our lives back.

In short, get this book. It is a deep labour of love

[sophie adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Have I told yall yet how much I love my current masters!!!!!!! We read Marquis Bey for a course last block, which was so cool so I picked up this book as a result of it. It was brilliant and beautiful and emotional ( the chapter about Chase my brothers child 🥺)